


The Vaccination

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [27]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-04 00:50:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 43,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15830349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: Ax has been intercepting yeerk transmissions, and he's found something strange. Something that might not have come from yeerks at all. Something that might have come from andalites.If he's right, this could change everything. Have the andalites finally arrived to save Earth? Is it all over? Or will this play out like the situation aboard the Ascalin?The Animorphs need to make some fast decisions about who to trust, and how much. Because if this is the miracle they've been hoping for, then whatever happens next will shape the future of their entire species, and the whole of planet Earth.Thanks to Redtailedhawk90 and Justanotherghostwriter for their excellent beta work





	1. Chapter 1

“So you’re Rachel’s best friend, right?” David asked. He was walking backwards, facing me, and he ducked under a tree branch without looking; we’d all made the journey to Ax’s meadow enough to be able to do it blind if we had to.

“Yes,” I said, bracing myself.

“Right. So her and Marco… it’s not serious, right? They’re just playing around?”

I blinked, and nearly dropped the newspapers I was carrying. “Her and Marco?”

“Yeah. I mean, Marco’s a jerk but he is a teammate, I don’t want to step on his toes or anything. He saw her first and all that. But they don’t seem to be going anywhere, and Rachel, she’s just so...”

“ _Rachel_ and _Marco_?”

“Yeah. You know, that… that thing they have.”

“David, that thing that Rachel and Marco have is a tendency to annoy the hell out of each other half the time and annoy everyone else around them all of the time. Rachel’s with Tobias.” I was pretty sure that Rachel was with Tobias.

David blinked at me. “Rachel’s dating _her pet bird_?”

“Tobias isn’t actually a bird,” I snapped. “You know that. He’s human, he just got trapped.”

“Yeah, he’s a smart bird. But now he’s just a bird. Do you see that future going anywhere? The two of the settling down in a nice nest up in the mountains after all this is over? I don’t.”

I looked away. “Tobias can be human again after we don’t need to fight,” I mumbled. “If he wants. It’s their business.”

David rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and then a Rachel who’s about twenty can walk around hand-in-hand with a thirteen-year-old kid. That’s not creepy at all. He already looks too young to be hanging out with us.”

“Look,” I said. “Rachel and Tobias’ lives are their business. Right now, I’m focused on winning this war so we can all have a future. Okay?”

<You are early,> Ax said as we entered the clearing. <You are welcome, but I hope that this is not because there is danger?>

I shrugged. “Not much else to do.” This wasn’t true – I did have some chores – but David was somewhat more tolerable to talk to if I didn’t have to do it alone.

“I was just bored,” David said. “There’s nothing on TV and the Kings are out.” In the couple of weeks since our adventure on Iskoort, David had been staying with the King family. There was no need to keep him away from the chee now that he knew everything, and they were better set up to house a human than the hork-bajir were.

<The others are coming up behind,> Tobias called, swooping into the clearing. He landed on his normal branch next to Ax’s scoop, followed by three more birds, who landed on the ground and started to demorph.

“Okay,” Jake said as soon as he had a mouth, “Ax, you called us here. What’s up?”

Ax shuffled nervously. <My news is...potentially complicated.> He glanced at the roll of newspapers in my hand. <Perhaps we should address other matters first?>

“Uh… okay.” Jake shrugged. “Cassie, why do you have newspapers?”

I handed them out. “Last three gazettes. Look at the frontline exclusives.”

People looked.

“The Sharing,” Marco said. “They all have special articles on The Sharing. Interviews, propaganda pieces...”

I nodded. “Really sudden, just starting three weeks ago. They’re not even subtle.”

“Tobias?” Jake said.

<I’ll look into it.>

“Right. Anything else?”

“The chee are in Egypt,” David said. “Erek said to tell you he doesn’t know how long they’ll be gone.”

“The Kings went to Egypt?” Rachel asked.

“No, the chee. All of them. Something about some tomb being unearthed and it’s a world-altering big deal, but when I asked for details they just said ‘it’s a chee problem’ and kept packing clothes they don’t wear into suitcases they don’t need so they wouldn’t look weird checking in at the airport.”

“So there might be some mysterious world-altering thing in a country we can’t get to, but we don’t know what it is and can’t do anything about it,” Marco summarised. “Great. Love having the chee to back us up. Open books, they are.”

“Anything else?” Jake asked. Nobody said anything. He looked to Ax. “Okay, Ax. Your turn.”

Ax hesitated. <This is probably nothing.>

“Don’t say that,” Marco said. “They’re the missions that almost get us killed.”

<Nearly all missions almost get us killed,> Tobias pointed out.

“What’s the ‘probably nothing’, Ax?” David asked.

Ax didn’t answer right away. He ground one hoof into a particularly thick tuft of grass.

<Shortly after you rescued me from the ocean, we attempted to call a bug fighter to steal and take me home,> he said. <You remember?>

“Of course. That was when we met Visser One,” Marco said, pretending not to notice our sidelong glances. “Also we nearly died in space. A new location for nearly dying. It was very scenic.”

<Yes. Well. To call the ship, we needed to make a Z-space transponder. I have been intermittently checking the local signals ever since, in case we can catch some pertinent yeerk intelligence, but ever since that mission, their military-relevant signals have been heavily encoded. But yesterday, I picked up something on a shadow frequency. Shadow frequencies do not hold coherent signals for long, so the signal must have been transmitted from somewhere very close by. I recorded some of it, if you will give me a moment.>

Ax trotted into his scoop, and returned a moment later holding the transponder; a wonky box of wires that belied its technological sophistication by being made of parts that weren’t designed to fit together the way Ax had used them. I suppressed a shudder looking at it. We’d nearly died getting the parts to build it, and nearly died again enacting our plan with it. It played static.

Ax twisted a knob, and the static became more rhythmic static, rising and falling slightly in pitch and volume. <It is encoded,> Ax explained. <Like the other signals I receive.>

“But…?” Rachel prompted.

<The encoding is different. The yeerks usually communicate in either a version of Yeerkish modified to be pronouncable by their hosts, or more commonly, Galard. Any language has an ‘accent’ when decoded to a sufficient degree, because of how their words and phrases are constructed. For the past three days, on this specific shadow frequency, I have been picking up signals like this. I cannot fully decode the messages, but I can state this: they not Yeerkish or Galard, unless they have been deliberately encrypted to sound like something else.>

“Great, more aliens,” Marco said. “Do we know what they are?”

<It is impossible to be certain without being able to completely decrypt the messages. I do not have sufficient information to do that.> Ax looked nervous. Very nervous.

“Who do you think they might be, Ax?” I prompted.

<The phrasing patterns are similar to – no, identical to – my native language,> Ax said. He turned his main eyes to Jake, his stalk eyes shifting between the rest of us, one by one. <There is a fairly high possibility that these signals are being transmitted by andalites.>


	2. Chapter 2

For a few seconds, nobody said anything.

Then, everyone started talking at once.

“Trap,” Marco said, at the same time as David was saying “Holy shit, it’s over?” Tobias asked <How far away is the signal, Ax-man?> while Rachel pumped a fist in the air and whooped and Jake said, “How sure are you?”

I waited. I didn’t want to make any assumptions right away.

Everyone settled down and looked at Jake, who nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Ax. What’s the chance that these are andalites?”

<It… would be difficult for me to assess that. The galaxy is a large place; commonalities between languages are not uncommon, and without completely decrypting a signal, I cannot be absolutely certain that my partial decryption is accurate. The assumptions that indicate partial success are the same things that I am basing my conclusion on, so if it is alien and convoluted enough for me not to notice, this entire argument could very well be circular. Different races have different standards. But of the species that I am familiar with, the only one with a language this much like ours are the yeerks, and it is not Yeerkish.>

“So… high?” Rachel asked.

Ax shrugged, a gesture that still looked weird on an andalite. <I do not know. I am not a linguistics expert. There could be many intelligent races in this area that I do not know. I did not know the chee existed until long after I arrived on this planet. Even if it is a species that I do know, the exobiology unit on galactic linguistics was… not engaging.>

“Ax, did you pay attention in _any_ of your exobiology classes?” Marco asked.

“This coming from Marco?” Rachel asked, crossing her arms. “Marco, King of Skipping?”

“I’m King of Clowning,” Marco said dismissively, waving a hand. “In skipping, I’m reaching Knighthood, at best.”

“Barony,” Jake said. “Knights are different.”

“So it looked very, very much like an andalite signal, but we can’t make a reliable guess without more information,” I said, trying to bring us back on track.

<Yes.>

“Right,” Jake said. “You said that it had to be nearby. How nearby? Like, are we talking on Earth kind of nearby?”

<Either from low orbit over us, or within America,> Ax said. <Shadow frequencies are not good signal carriers. In an atmosphere like this one, they are outperformed by radio! They are only ever used for reasons of secrecy.>

“It can’t be that secret,” David said. “You found it.”

<Only because I was looking, in the hope of picking up local yeerk activity. Very few people routinely check zero-space shadow frequencies. And the signal would be extraordinarily difficult to break, even for an expert, so finding it tells a listener very little.>

“Except for us,” I said. “It’s told us that there might be other andalites.”

“Is there a way to track its origin?” David asked.

<No.>

“Why not? Can’t we just build a couple more of those radio things and triangulate its location?”

<We cannot. The signal is not moving through normal space. Zero-space is full of fluctuations. At a range of light-years, rough triangulation is possible, but for somewhere the size of this continent, the distance fluctuations are larger than the real space the signal must cover. Without a detailed local zero-space map, it cannot be done.>

“Can’t decode the message, can’t locate the origin, can’t be sure it’s andalites,” Marco said, shaking his head. “That’s good news, I guess.”

“How is any of that good news?” Rachel asked.

“It means it’s not a yeerk trap. For a trap to work, your target needs to realistically be able to find it.” He tried to keep his voice steady, but there was a tremor in it. A hint of the excitement, the hope, that we were all feeling.

Was this it? Was it over?

Had the andalites finally come to save us?


	3. Chapter 3

We talked for over an hour, achieving basically nothing. There was no question that we had to check this out, no matter how flimsy the evidence. But how would we find the andalites? Nobody knew. Why hadn’t the chee heard any chatter about an andalite force arriving? Nobody knew. The andalite homeworld knew where we were, so why hadn’t they made contact? Nobody knew.

After everybody’s emotional endurance started to wane and we all started to look about ready to panic, Jake suggested we all sleep on it and sent everyone home. This was a decision he hadn’t made in a long time, and I used to consider it a bit of a cowardly move, since sleeping on it rarely achieved anything. But I’d gotten used to the group in our time working together, and now I could see what he was doing – he was splitting us up before anyone could publically freak out. We could finish this later. Calmer.

I went home. I needed to take notes.

My room was a mess. It had been for months. Once upon a time I used to be able to keep it clean, do my homework, do my chores and fight alien invaders, but somewhere along the line, my priorities had sorted themselves out. School was a cover, and I put in enough effort to stay there. Room tidiness was of negligible usefulness, so I mostly ignored it.

My counsellor, in between Sharing pitches, had given me a lot of good advice on life priorities. He didn’t know I was using it to fight his people. My bed wasn’t made, piles of books were mixed into piles of clothing, and all my birthday presents were still sitting on a chair in one corner. No; not all of my birthday presents. Just the ones from my birthday party. The ones from the Animorphs. Sitting there like offerings on a shrine. The nice jeans and shirt from Rachel sat on top of the weighty tome about animal biology from Jake (Marco’s Birkenstocks gift card acting as a bookmark) and The History of Chocolate Through the Ages from Ax. The painting that Tobias had bought me, a beautiful landscape showing the light of a rising sun dancing off a clear river surrounded by lush forests, was propped carefully against the back of the chair, and David, who hadn’t been around long enough to know me very well but had seen me take a lot of notes, had bought me a very nice stationary set made entirely from non-animal, ethically-sourced products, which sat under the painting.

Erek had been at my birthday party too, but his present was tucked away right in the back of a drawer, along with the surprisingly accurate carving of a running wolf that the hork-bajir had presented me with. This was because his gift had been an elaborate necklace of gold and turquoise beads. The weight and tarnish left no doubt that it was real, and the imprecise shapes were clearly made without machines. On the back of a large, flat turquoise bead in the center, some heiroglyphs that I couldn’t read were carved.

It was obviously a very, very old Egyptian necklace. So old that I felt guilty just touching it. I felt like I should donate it to a museum or something. Put it in the care of… of someone else, someone who could display and appreciate it properly. But I knew I couldn’t do that, because this wasn’t some ownerless relic found in a grave. It was Erek’s. It was chee history as much as it was human history, and Erek was still alive, the same person who had presumably owned it back when it was contemporary jewellery. Surrendering it to human curators who would see it as something dead would be a slap in the face to my chee friends, a statement that their past wasn’t their own.

But I could never wear something like that, either. So it sat, hidden, with the little wooden wolf.

Right then, though, the chee and the hork-bajir weren’t the issue. I had other aliens to think about. I grabbed a notebook – not the one David had bought me; I wasn’t ready to disassemble my little shrine yet – and started to take notes.

I wrote ‘Andalites – likelihood of arrival.’

I wrote ‘Andalite (?) language message?? Anything else?’

Then I paused.

The evidence was weak. Wasn’t it?

Was it? Ax had seemed pretty certain, even if he was telling us he wasn’t. He wouldn’t have come to us with information like that unless he was really sure; he would’ve tried to investigate a little with Tobias first if he had doubts. The others had accepted it. Even though, logically, we couldn’t really rate how reliable the evidence was. If I were stranded among aliens, would I recognise a human code as fundamentally human? Who could say?

The strength of the evidence couldn’t be determined. So why was I so set on seeing it as weak? If I had a strong bias there, it was important to factor into my calculations. There were several possible causes for it. There was sheer mental habit; in science, you started from an assumption that a relationship between two things didn’t exist, and then set out to see if your evidence could prove you wrong, so evidence-of-indeterminate-reliability had to be estimated conservatively. But that didn’t apply here; we weren’t going to get a chance to repeat a bunch of trials and see what evidence won out. This was more like detective work than science.

I knew that, and I’d worked on flimsy evidence in the past. Maybe I was being doubtful because nobody else was? Everyone else was just assuming there were andalites; was I subconsciously trying to be a counterbalance? Possibly. But the normal balance would reassert itself soon enough. Marco, especially, would pull us on track, coming up with all the dangerous possibilities. Rachel would be naturally suspicious. They didn’t need me to do it for them.

Or did I… did I not want the andalites to be there? Why not? My interactions with andalites had been, on the whole, quite positive. Sure, they were arrogant to a fault, but I was a member of a species who spoke routinely of ‘humanising’ things if sympathy was created for them, and said that good people had ‘humanity’ and sapient beings were deserving of ‘human rights’, so it seemed a little hypocritical to fault them on that. Elfangor had gone against his people’s most sacred laws to save us. He and every warrior on his Dome ship had died trying to protect us. Ax had been a loyal ally and good friend, and while we were endangered by one andalite traitor near Leera, the rest of his ship – and the andalites we met on the surface – were brave and honorable people who were perfectly willing to die to defend the freedom of a planet that wasn’t theirs. Even Keilin, the captain’s wife on Leera, had been friendly and fun. In fact, the only thing that really, truly annoyed me about the andalites was their treatment of Ax, insisting he take the fall for his brother’s crimes – something that had nothing to do with their treatment of us. This whole time, we had been waiting for them to come and save us.

Was that it? Did I not want to be saved?

I didn’t think that was relevant to the probability thing, but once the thought had come into my head, I couldn’t get rid of it. Did I want the andalites to stay back and let us fight? Did I not want the war to be taken from me? Did I not want to go be a normal teenager and lose the fight, lose the animorphs? That couldn’t be right. That would be absurdly selfish.

I stopped myself right there. I needed to focus on who I was, not who I wanted to be. Perhaps I was absurdly selfish. It was better to know that up-front than to refuse to face it. If I didn’t know the truth, I couldn’t compensate for it. I’d be putting my own denial-based comfort ahead of my ability to make the best decisions to help my friends and my planet.

And that really would be selfish.

So no guilt or denial, not until I had the data. Facts first, value judgements later.

My gaze drifted once again to the pile of presents on my chair. If the war was over tomorrow, the Animorphs would… what? Well, I guess the details would depend on exactly what happened; what state the earth was in, whether the Animorphs became well-known, whether we were loved or hated… but what would happen to us internally? Would we still be friends?

Before the war, we’d been… most of us had known each other. Rachel and I had hung out. Marco and Jake had hung out. I’d thought Jake was cute. But we hadn’t had the circle of friends, brothers and sisters in arms, held together by a war we couldn’t win. Relying on each other for our survival and our sanity. If that glue was taken away, what would we be? Would we even hang out any more? Would Rachel let herself be angry over all the times I’d betrayed her, pulling her friends and family into the war, and refuse to talk to me? Would Marco or Tobias ever have any reason to talk to me again? Would David have any reason to even stay in town? Would Ax go back to his people?

And Jake… would Jake still want me? Would I still want him? In the war, we needed each other. Not… like that, but as comrades-in-arms. I saw and admired his leadership skills all the time. I wasn’t sure what he saw in me, but whatever it was, he was exposed to a lot of it. If the war ended tomorrow… would the people we became still be interested in each other?

My own desperation for some kind of reassurance on the issue sickened me. I was addicted to the Animorphs, wasn’t I? Before the war, I hadn’t had a very strong friendship group. I’d hang out with a few people, but my only real, enduring friend was Rachel, and if she wanted, she could do much better than me for a best friend. That was my natural state – Cassie, the nice girl, but not really a part of anyone’s group. And now I had six ready-made friends who had no choice but to see me regularly. I had the Barn, I had the animals, I’d started taking the notes; I wasn’t brave or strong or smart like the others but every helping hand was a helping hand, and somehow I’d become a key figure in the group. We all had. There were so few of us that everyone was a key figure by default.

And they loved me. They were sad and worried when I went missing. They were overjoyed when they were able to help me escape being a butterfly. They’d all bought me such thoughtful presents. Maybe that was why the war didn’t send me into unending despair, raging at the unfairness of the world; maybe I felt that I was being paid adequately for my services. I had six whole people who weren’t related to me, who still cared whether I lived or died. Maybe, to me, that was worth the pain and fear and violence and danger. To myself. To all those poor victims of the yeerks.

To my friends? Was it worth the pain and danger to them?

No. No, if the andalites showed up and took the war out of our hands tomorrow… I’d thank them. I wasn’t sure if I’d thank them for me. But I’d definitely thank them for saving the other Animorphs the pain of continuing. That would be worth losing them. That would be worth everything.

So why didn’t I want to believe that they’d come? Just general pessimism? That couldn’t be right. I’d always been an optimist – a cautious one, but an optimist all the same. And it had been going well. Optimism had served me well with Aftran, in Australia, with David, with… well, it hadn’t gone great with Fenestre, but that was just one mission. And Iskoort, apart from the part with Jake dying, had gone amazingly well. If anything, I should be subconsciously doubling down on my optimism right now. I should be having the opposite conversation with myself right now, telling myself not to get too excited and make too many assumptions. Because if we went out there expecting andalites, expecting to be saved, and found someone else, then…

Then we’d be crushed, wouldn’t we? Was that it? Was I trying to emotionally protect myself? It was more productive, logically, to assume andalites and put everything towards finding them with just a little caution in case they turned out to be an enemy instead. But emotionally, it was safest to assume nothing. Or assume danger.

I was getting really tired of assuming danger. I was getting tired of flinching at sudden movements, of searching for signs of hostility in every comment made by a teacher or classmate, and now it was creeping into my plans and predictions. This was how Marco thought, wasn’t it? This was what Marco’s mind was like.

I didn’t want to be like Marco.

I hadn’t known Marco well before the war. Had Marco learned to be like this when his mother disappeared without meaning or explanation? At that point, he’d had to take on the responsibility of keeping himself and his father alive. Right from the start of the war, he’d had a very realistic position – war was dangerous, we were going to die if we got involved, all we could do was stay safe and try to protect the handful of people we cared about. A view born from his experience with that exact thing. Something that we were all very, very familiar with by now. It was amazing that we weren’t all pessimistic wrecks by now.

Were we? I tried to recall any recent conversations with my friends. Rachel… angry and frustrated a lot of the time, looking for threats wherever she went. She had always had a drive to excel at everything, and that was still there, but now she pursued her schoolwork and gymnastics with a sort of grim determination rather than joy. Only shopping was relaxing any more. And the war; there was no desire to excel there, to attain personal mastery. Just a desire to survive. To keep everyone alive. And to kill, or at the very least frighten off, anything that dared to make her feel scared that it wouldn’t work.

Jake. Jake seemed fine. He smiled, he joked, he treated the group with gentle patience and rolled his eyes at Marco’s dumb jokes. But I remembered the conversation we’d had at the airport last month. _“A leader can be just as scared and weak and doubtful as the rest of his unit. But he isn’t allowed to show it… If I give into fear, that gives everyone leave to give into fear. If I give into rage or pity or grief, that gives everyone leave to give into rage or pity or grief. And when that happens, our entire fighting force becomes useless. Understand?”_

Ax was… coping with being stranded far away from everyone he ever knew and loved, possibly never to see them again, and if he ever did, to live with the disgrace of his brother’s crime. He seemed to be doing well, but he was an alien. How could I tell how he was doing? I could only judge him by human standards.

Tobias was… holding together well, considering his circumstances, but he hadn’t been very social even before being turned into a bird. We Animorphs were his only social connection. After the war, that would be a problem, but for now...

David… was too new to really judge. He was trying to fit in, and doing okay, the distant promise of saving his family keeping him going. He reminded me of Jake, much earlier in the war. Or Marco, in that period of time after he found out his mother was Visser One’s host, before he told us. He was probably doing the best out of all of us, but that was just because he was new. How long would that last?

And me. I’d thought I was doing okay. I really was. I was able to look like I was holding it together in front of my parents. I was able to hide the anxiety attacks and the nightmares, and they were becoming less about things I’d experienced and more about weird adventures on a strange island, so that was… probably a good sign, right? But really, it hadn’t been that long ago that I’d effectively tried to commit suicide, walking off into the forest intending to become a _nothlit_ and let my human mind just wither into nothing in a way that Tobias fought never to do. And it had been barely any time at all since I’d been screaming for an unarmed man’s blood, ready to endanger my entire team for it, to the point where they assumed I was a Controller. It had only been a couple of weeks since I’d lost Jake and become… not an emotional wreck, like I’d expected. Just numb, hollow, poking at his absence like a missing tooth. Ready to do anything. Ready to kill my enemy and sacrifice anything to do it. I’d acquired a sapient being without even bothering to try to ask permission. Were my morals that easily dismissed?

Was I worrying over nothing? It was a war. We were doing better than we should, by any rights. We were all able to function, all able to fight. So maybe things were okay. But then, if that was the perspective I was going to adopt – “things are fine until they break” – then eventually, one of us was going to have some kind of very public nervous breakdown, and suddenly things wouldn’t be okay, and we’d be taken entirely by surprise. It was better to think about this now. It was better to plan now. We had to start making plans.

Plans to protect our families, if we were found out. Plans to protect ourselves, if we couldn’t cope. Plans for our families if we never came home…

Might be irrelevant. Everything might be changing now. If there were andalites out there, on Earth…

Yes, that’s what I needed to think about. That was my job. That was how I got things done. And it was _effective_. I had to trust Marco to maintain caution, I had to trust Rachel to be protective, I had to trust Ax’s intelligence and Tobias’ vigilance and Jake to maintain balance. My job was to look for the grand victories, to plan for what happened if we somehow won, if things worked out. To take reasonable, but big… well, leaps of faith. A weird job for a rationalist, maybe… but so far, the system we had was working, and for that to keep happening, I had to do my part.

I had to _hope_.

Because if I didn’t, who would?


	4. Chapter 4

We had school the next day. Normally, in the middle of a mission, school was just frustrating for me. None of this was going to matter to my future after the war; it was mostly a waste of time that I put up with for the sake of my cover. But maintaining that cover was less effort than abandoning it. If we abandoned our cover, we’d have to uproot our families. We’d have to tell them everything. We’d have to be in morph any time we were in public. Anything less would be a huge risk, in case the yeerks figured out who we were. School was easier. School didn’t involve trying to explain the blood on my hands to my parents and dragging them away from the lives they’d built for themselves.

Also, it was… normal. An anchor to the world we were living in, and trying to save. Which was refreshing, at the moment. And it wasn’t like we could make any progress on our mission. We needed to figure out how to track an untrackable signal. Until we solved that problem, there was nothing to do. Might as well do nothing in history class.

Jake, Marco, Rachel and I were all in the same history class. Our normal teacher, Ms Paloma, was on maternity leave, so we had Mr Tidwell filling in for her. He strode into the room, face stern, and put a pile of books neatly on the corner of his completely clear desk. He swept his gaze over the class, and even Marco sat up straighter.

“We’re starting chapter six today,” he said. “Open your books to page 312 and read the introduction.”

We opened our books. We read. Mr Tidwell was the strictest teacher in the school, and today he looked particularly annoyed.

I couldn’t pay attention, though. I was supposed to be learning about America’s participation in the Second World War, and all I could think about was the war we were in the middle of, that had the potential to be a far bigger one. But that the andalites might be able to stop, before it got that bad. Maybe even secretly, who knows?

Once upon a time, I’d have devoured every detail in the book that I could absorb, taking the boring parts as a sort of personal challenge. Once upon a time, I’d loved learning things for learning’s sake. I still did, I supposed, but my tastes were a lot more pragmatic than they used to be. History was a practical subject for some people, but it wasn’t helping me to protect the planet. I only had so much attention to give. How was this going to help me figure out how to find the andalites?

They were in America. Or above America. We knew that. So… if they were here for a reason… they were probably very close by, right? All the information we had suggested that our town had the one and only major Yeerk Pool, for some absurd reason. Andalites nearby had to be targeting that, right? So… they were probably in the national forest, like Ax and Tobias and the hork-bajir. The enormous national forest. There was no way we could search all of it.

My eyes drifted to a map of the world in my textbook, outlining the different countries and their alliances. There were a lot of complicated notes about whom was allied to whom and why – different diplomatic considerations, safety considerations, resource considerations. There were no such complicated alliances in our war. There were the conquerors, and the defenders, and the andalites here to help the defenders. The most complicated it got was a handful of voluntary controllers, and yeerks like Visser Three’s twin, hurting the war effort while vying for personal power.

“When you are finished, there are some review questions at the bottom to complete,” Mr Tidwell told us.

I glanced down at the questions. They were trivial; the answers were in the text. They were just there to prove we were paying attention.

We didn’t really have diplomatic considerations in our war. The safety considerations were straightforward. But resource considerations?

Any animal set up a habitat based on its biological needs. What did andalites need?

In my book, I made notes. _The locations that armies can set up are restricted by access to resources_ , I wrote. _Food. Water_. Then I nudged Rachel’s ankle with my foot, and glanced meaningfully at the line.

She studied it for a few moments, looking puzzled. Then her eyes widened.

 _River?_ She mouthed at me. I shrugged.

The river wasn’t the only water source in the national forest. It wasn’t even the only river. But it was a better place to start than grid searching the entire forest. We couldn’t plan or strategise properly in class, of course; any note-taking or whispering would be noticed, and besides, the boys sat over the other side of the room from us. The other Animorphs had all started taking andalite hand signal lessons from Ax (even Tobias who, to an annoyance I had tried and failed to talk myself out of, was picking the language up far faster than I had even though he didn’t normally have hands), but speaking andalite in a school infested with yeerks struck me as a terrible idea. Planning would have to wait until after school.

Except after school, Rachel had a very important duty.

“I have to go shopping,” she told me apologetically on our way to the bus stop.

“You love shopping,” I pointed out.

“I have to take Jordan and Sara shopping,” she clarified. “Jordan’s had a growth spurt and needs new pants and Mum is super busy with a case. We’re meeting at the mall. Come with me?”

“We are kind of in the middle of a thing,” I pointed out, not wanting to say ‘andalite’ aloud in public.

<We’ll meet at the mall,> Tobias said, making me jump as I hadn’t realised he was nearby. <I’ll let everyone know. It’s faster than everyone going all the way out to Cassie’s anyway.>

Rachel gave a grateful little wave, no more than a slight fluttering of the fingers. I didn’t argue. With almost half of our team needing to morph to go in public these days, meeting in public places didn’t strike me as entirely practical, but they had to morph to meet in the barn anyway, so why not the mall? Ax was getting much better at not obsessively devouring every bit of food in sight.

So we headed for the mall.

We had about fifteen minutes, Rachel said, before her sisters would show up. According to her mom, Rachel was supposed to pick them up from school and walk them to the mall, but according to the girls themselves, Jordan would get Sara and bring her and nobody’s mom needed to know the details. I wondered how much babysitting Jordan had ended up doing since Rachel had become an Animorph. How old was she? Ten? Eleven?

“Hey Ax,” Rachel said quietly as we Animorphs settled into a table in the food court appropriately far from other occupied tables and close to a shop music speaker, “you know that thing you did to make your human morph?”

“The _frolis_ manoeuvre? What of it?” Ax was only half paying attention. He was eyeing the Cinnabon.

“Is that something you can teach us, or does that bump into your whole Prime Directive thing?” She jerked a thumb at David. “I’m just thinking, it’s going to be way simpler to meet up if nobody has to do the half-morph thing every time we go in public.”

Ax considered this. “Hmm. It is diff-i-cul-tuh to determine whether or not that would break the letter of the law, given that you already possess the technology… gee...”

“But the spirit?” I asked.

Ax shrugged, not meeting my eyes. “My people do not seem to care about the spirit of the law,” he muttered bitterly. “And my brother broke the letter of it, for which they will blame me anyway, so...”

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” David interjected, “but if disguise is going to be a problem, I’ll just find some random tourist and acquire him right before he leaves town.” He shrugged. “It isn’t that complicated.”

I tried not to purse my lips and look like a disapproving grandmother. This wasn’t the time or place to get into yet another discussion about the morality of morphing intelligent beings without consent.

“Can we use less of the technical lingo in public?” Marco asked David quietly. “Are you sure you’re related to a spy?”

David opened his mouth to respond, but Jake jumped in before an argument could start. “So the river, then?” he prompted.

I nodded. “There are other water sources in the forest, but it’s a good place to start.”

“Better than searching the whole forest,” Tobias agreed.

“Okay,” Jake said, nodding. “We already have a pattern and schedule for this. We do it the same as the time Cassie went missing. We just need to add David and Cassie to the rota.”

“Rachel!” a little girl’s voice called from across the food court. Sara, Rachel’s youngest sister, was waving frantically, swamped by her schoolbag. She would have bolted over if Jordan, looking exactly like a miniature Rachel, didn’t have her other wrist gripped tightly in her hand.

The girls strode over, an invisible path clearing before them as people recognised in Jordan’s walk that she’d happily walk right over them if they happened to be in the way. She didn’t release her sister’s hand until she was close enough to touch the table.

“Who’s the new guy?” Jordan asked Rachel.

“D… Daniel,” David invented wildly. “Nice to meet you.”

“Uh-huh.”

He looked Jordan up and down. “So you’re, what, Rachel’s twin? Why do you go to a different school then?”

Jordan blushed and hid a smile. Rachel shot David a look containing every bit as much malevolence as Visser Three had ever projected at us. David instantly paled, and was suddenly even more engrossed in the nearby Cinnabon sign than Ax.

“Okay,” Rachel said, “let’s eat and go.”

“Bun-zuh?” Ax said hopefully.

“Sure,” she muttered. “Why not make our day even more ridiculous?”

“Are there a lot less people in here all of a sudden?” Jordan asked.

“BEEEANZUH!” a teenage girl’s voice shouted from a nearby bookshop. “JELLY BEAN-ZUH!”

We all froze for about two seconds.

“What’s – ?” Jordan began.

“The red ones are the best! No, no, the blue! The green-eeen-eeeen ones-zuh!”

Jake glanced at Rachel’s sisters, then met Rachel’s eyes.

“Oh my god,” Rachel gasped, “it’s some kind of psycho! Jordan, Sara, let’s get out of here.”

“I wanna see!” Sara moaned as Rachel threw an arm around her waist and marched off in the opposite direction from the chaos, Jordan in tow.

“Ax, Tobias, David,” Jake said quickly, picking out the three of us who didn’t have to worry too much about being recognised, “get him out of here. Everyone else, we’re on interference. Get them an exit path.”

Ax, Tobias and David made a beeline for the growing crowd around the bookshop. I let them get ahead a bit, then headed for the crowd myself.

The girl causing the scene looked about our age. She was wearing a very large shirt and a long skirt that even I could tell didn’t match. Reddish-brown, waist-length hair hid her face as she bowed it over a double handful of jelly beans. She was heedless of the glass fragments from the vending machine that lay smashed nearby, scattering jelly beans across the floor. Two nervous shop assistants stood indecisively nearby, clearly debating on whether to try to restrain her or wait for security. They were pleading with her to calm down and get out of the glass; she ignored them.

“Ashley!” David exclaimed, racing forward. “Are you okay?”

The girl glanced up at him, puzzled, then her eyes darted to Ax’s hands. He was signing her an andalite message, too fast for me to follow.

“It’s okay,” David announced. “It’s my sister. She has medication for this… come on, sis...”

The girl… the andalite… looked disoriented as David and Tobias helped her up, one taking each arm, and started leading her through the crowd. But she didn’t resist them.

I moved through the crowd ahead of them, just a concerned bystander getting out of their way, helping to clear a path in the process. Some of the other bystanders took my lead; I physically pushed past those who didn’t. Soon, they were out. Mall security was approaching. David and Tobias quickened their pace, Ax taking the lead. If security decided to stop and question them, there could be trouble – David had no proof that he was the andalite’s brother, and the andalite clearly had no idea how to act like a human at all. We had no idea how many controllers were around, either with mall security or as bystanders. Every moment we lingered was a risk.

I strode towards the security guards, mind racing. I needed to come up with something to distract them… some problem… argh, why did I have to be such a bad liar?!

That was when the singing started.

The terrible, terrible singing.

As the boys hustled the andalite towards the exit, a single, brave voice rose in song. Male, young, and more impassioned, more dramatic, less in tune with every passing second.

“Hit me baby one more time!”

It was Marco. He was standing on the counter of the Starbucks, gyrating his hips in what he probably thought was a good Elvis impression but wasn’t. While I stood, frozen, trying to figure out why he was doing Elvis moves to a Britney Spears song, mall security made a beeline for the Starbucks.

By the time they got close enough that he had to spring off the counter and make a run for it, the others had successfully smuggled the andalite out.

<Prince Jake,> Ax said, <what do we do now? He will likely leave once we are outside, and I have no authority to – >

<Let him,> Jake replied (presumably having snuck off somewhere and morphed). <Tobias, follow him, and try very hard not to be seen.>

<Aye, aye, captain.>

<Great, just what I need – more nicknames.>

<Aye aye, Fearless Prince.>


	5. Chapter 5

“Who is he?” Jake asked, pacing. “How many of them are there? Ax, how much did you tell them?”

We were in the barn, a couple of hours later. I looked up from the snake whose wound I was bandaging to frown at Jake. His agitation was starting to upset my patient.

“She,” Ax said.

“What?”

“She.” He shook his head, looking a little stunned. “A female _aristh_. Her name is Estrid-Corrill-Darrath. She had no idea that I… that we were even here.”

“What did you tell her about us?” Jake pressed. “Does she know who we are? How many of us there are?”

Ax shook his head again. “I introduced myself. Tobias and David did not. I mentioned that I was acting under orders from my Prince, but did not give a name. She was as confused by my presence as I was by hers.”

“So she thinks we’re andalites,” Marco summarised.

“I assume so,” Ax said. Then he added, “So. Sosossso.”

“This is weird,” I muttered, putting the snake away. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“Tobias,” Jake said, “their camp?”

<I tracked Estrid to a small camp on the edge of a meadow. I saw two other andalites, both male, before I retreated to avoid being seen. I didn’t see any military equipment, but they’re hiding... something.>

“Hiding something?”

<They’ve got something covered with woven branches so it can’t be seen from the air. It’s cleverly done; I don’t think a human would be able to tell that it wasn’t a natural canopy.>

“Probably their descent craft,” Ax said. “That would be standard procedure.”

“Would it have weapons?” Jake asked.

“Rudimentary defense weapons, certainly. More than that would depend on the mission.”

“But they’re andalites?” Marco asked. “They’re definitely andalites?”

<Oh, yeah. They’re andalites.>

We all silently reflected on this for a few moments.

<So what now?> Tobias asked.

“Hang on,” Rchel said. “This Estrid. I thought that andalites didn’t let girls fight? Don’t they all have to stay at home and do gardening or something?”

“She is a _thelin_ ,” Ax said, still sounding stunned. “In the military. This is a very bad sign.”

“A what now?”

“A female warrior. Andalite females are perfectly capable of fighting to defend themselves and their children; their tailblades are small, but as sharp as anybody else’s. But it is the duty of males to defend the society while females manage it. If a female is fighting, it is because her men are all dead, and the enemy has moved to the heart of the glade. That there are no more lines of defense.”

“Which for us, means…?” Rachel prompted.

“If females are being recruited as _arisths_? It means that the war has become very desperate indeed,” he said grimly.

“But they’re here,” I said. “They came.” I heard the relief in my own voice.

“Okay,” Marco said. “They’re here. Now what?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, is this just their war now? Are we clocking out? Are we acting as support for them? Because on Leera they were desperate enough to use our help, but somehow I don’t think an Earth-focused andalite fleet is going to need us.”

“So we can go back to having normal lives,” Rachel said. She was trying to sound relieved. But she didn’t quite manage it. She sounded like someone congratulating their friend on winning a competition they’d wanted to win themselves. Disappointed, but trying to hide it.

I jumped in to save her before Marco or David could make a sarcastic remark. “No,” I said. “We can’t. This is our planet; none of us have it in us to leave it to someone else. We can’t stop protecting it.”

“I can,” Marco said instantly. “I never wanted to be in this war.”

“No, you can’t,” I said. “What about your mother? Tom? David’s parents? You’re the most trapped out of all of us, except for Ax.”

Marco crossed his arms. “You’re the one who wanted to save the whole world.”

“And if the andalites are here and that was still my only reason, then great; world saved,” I said with a shrug. “But it’s not my only reason any more, and it was never your reason in the first place. You’re going to keep fighting, Marco, because your friends are going to keep fighting.” I looked from Animorph to Animorph. “Jake, we all know there’s not a chance of you leaving this war while there’s still any hope of rescuing Tom. Rachel, you’ve never been able to stand by while vulnerable people get hurt, not since we were little kids; what makes you think you’d be able to start now? David, you were never Earth’s only defense, so it’s not even a question for you; you joined the fight, on your own terms, to save your parents and help protect your planet, and that hasn’t changed. Tobias, you’ve sacrificed everything you have for this war, without hesitation, because Elfangor needed you and Earth needed you – I don’t believe you’re going to be able to walk away before this war is done, especially with Ax still in it. Ax is an andalite warrior wherever he goes and whoever he works with. As for me, well, I’ve been pretty explicit about my motivations all along, to the point where some of you keep telling me to shut up; they haven’t changed. Marco… you’re not going to be able to convince yourself to leave this war. You wouldn’t be able to stand knowing that we were still putting ourselves in danger, and not do anything to help. You wouldn’t be able to look your father in the eye, knowing that he was working on radio telescopes in a town full of yeerks and you weren’t protecting him. And there’s still that slight chance that your mother might be out there.”

Marco looked away.

“What happened to your mom?” David asked.

“She’s Visser One’s host,” Marco said hollowly. “I tried to kill her.”

David’s eyes widened.

“He saved all our lives,” I jumped in. “She was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It wasn’t an assassination attempt or anything.” I made a mental note of Marco’s present tense language choice. He believed that she was still alive.

“What are we doing,” Jake said, “with the andalites?”

“Uh, go meet up with them, I guess?” Rachel shrugged. “Tobias knows where they are, so… time to put on your Prince Jake face, cousin.”

Jake rubbed his temples. “I am not going to Prince Jake it up for the rest of this war. It’s exhausting.”

“It’s important to make a good impression,” Rachel said, trying not to smirk.

Jake nodded. “Alright. Rachel thinks we should make contact and pull the honorable Earth warrior act. What does everyone else think?”

“She’s right,” David said. “We need to strike first. It’s our planet, we need to take control of the situation.”

“I don’t think we can take control of an alien war fleet,” I said. “But yeah, we should make the first move here, especially if they don’t know who we are.”

“Which is weird,” Marco said. “Andalite high command knows who we are. Why don’t these guys?”

<Estrid does not know us, but she is an _aristh_ ,> Ax explained. < _Arisths_ are not generally given a great deal of information. Their duty is to obey orders. Presumably her superiors know of us. >

“I think we should be careful,” Marco said. “The last time we ran into andalites, we all nearly died when Captain Traitor got a ship full of his own brave warriors killed.”

“That was one bad andalite,” I said, shrugging, “out if the dozens we met. I think our odds are good with these ones. They came all the way to Earth, after all.”

“And that other jerk went all the way to Leera,” Marco shrugged. “All this means is that the stakes are way higher. A traitor here could sell our identities to Visser Three.”

I hadn’t even considered that.

“Look,” Marco continued. “If there are traitors in the higher-ups here, well, there’s not much we can do about that; they know. But if the lower ranks don’t get told anything, like Ax says, and we walk in all ‘hey, we’re humans who can morph and have been a pain in yeerk butts since Elfangor died’, then that puts us at way more risk. I say we stay out of these guys’ way. We do our missions, they do theirs, we save our planet.”

“We’d be far more effective coordinated,” I pointed out.

“We’d be at more risk, too. And with andalites here, we’re not humanity’s greatest hope any more. We can afford to back off for a little while. I say we check these guys out, see what they’re doing, work around them… but they don’t need to know any more about us than they already do.”

“If the andalites are here,” David said, “do your identities even matter any more? It doesn’t matter for half of us already; Visser Three already knows me and Ax, and it’s not like Tobias’ life would change if he found out. For the rest of you guys, yeah, you have home lives and all that, but the reason he’s been after us is because we keep getting in the way of his planet-conquering, right? If the andalites are here, then we move way down his priority list.”

“Are you saying that you think he’d nicely leave us alone if he found out who we are?” Marco asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I’m not an idiot. I’m saying, that information is no longer valuable. If some traitor was going to give important secrets to the yeerks, they’d give, I dunno, the andalite equivalent of nuclear codes. As soon as the yeerks learn there’s an army here, we don’t matter any more.”

“In practical terms, you’re right,” I told him, “but the thing about Visser Three is, he’s extremely vindictive. I’m sure he’d want to hunt us all down personally if he got the chance, even if we’re not of military value any more. So yeah, contact does put us at some risk. But… so does lack of contact. This is our planet; the andalites don’t have a clue how thing work here. Remember Ax, when he first arrived? Remember Estrid in the mall today? I still can’t believe we’ve managed to keep this war underground; there’s no way the andalites can do it alone. If we don’t get in there, if we don’t find some way to exert some control over how things are done here on the planet’s surface, at least, humanity is going to find out about the whole thing and it’ll be open warfare. And we already know what that’ll do to the human population.”

Jake nodded. “Ax? Tobias? Thoughts?”

<Marco’s right,> Tobias said. <We don’t want to go in blind here. I can scout a bit more, see what I can find. But Cassie’s right, too; we don’t want to take too long about it.>

“Ax?” Jake asked.

<I… do not think I have much to contribute to this discussion,> Ax said, looking away with all four of his eyes. <When it comes to dealing with my own kind, my history has shown my opinion to be… unreliable.>

“How so?” Jake asked.

<When we were picked up by the Ascalin, approaching Leera – >

But Jake was already sinking into his Prince Jake role, and cut Ax off with a dismissive flick of one flat hand. It was a gesture Ax occasionally made with his tail.

“You fulfilled your oath to me and returned to your people, as had always been the plan,” Jake said impatiently. “That Prince was a traitor who hadn’t been caught by his own warriors. Did you expect to do what they couldn’t in a couple of hours?”

<N-no, Prince Jake.>

“Do you remember your current oath to me?”

<Yes, Prince Jake.>

“Do you intend to violate it?”

<No, Prince Jake!>

“Then what, exactly, is the problem?”

<There… is no problem, Prince Jake. I was merely pointing out that my judgement of character in this matter has not been… historically flawless.>

“I’m not asking you to judge the character of people we haven’t even met yet. I’m asking how you think we should approach this, since you know more about andalite attitudes and protocols than any of us. What’s our next move? How will they react to us?”

Ax considered this. <It is very unlikely that they will take us seriously as a military force. It is possible that you will have some leverage if they have read Prince Galuit-Enilon-Esgarrouth’s account of our actions on Leera. He seemed rather impressed with you, Prince Jake. But even then, it is unlikely that they have any intention of making contact with any Earth military, and such a small force using a weapon so commonly overlooked by andalites is unlikely to garner much influence.>

“So we should expect this to be pretty much like Leera, then?” Marco asked.

<Largely, yes. However, you have one advantage, as humans – these andalites clearly know nothing of human culture and conventions. They will, indeed, need local advisors. We are likely to have their ear on such matters.>

I nodded. “Good. We can use that to minimise collateral.”

<Other than that, they will probably expect me to swear myself to one of their Princes and expect the rest of you to stay out of the way.>

“I guess it’s going to be awkward when we don’t do that, then,” Rachel said.

“Okay,” Jake said. “We should scout this out, then decide on when and how to approach. We really have no idea how many andalites are here or what their big Earth-saving plan is, and it’s going to be easier to find out some things before we make contact. Everyone, make your excuses to your families. We have no idea how long this is going to take.”

“Not tonight,” Marco said, shaking his head. “It’ll be dark.”

“We have owl morphs,” I pointed out.

<And andalite night vision is awful,> Tobias added. <Have you seen Ax move around at night?>

<My homeworld has much brighter sunlight, and far more reflective moons,> Ax said defensively. <Your planet happens to be dimly lit.>

“That’s my point, though,” Marco said. “These are soldiers, hiding out from their enemy. I bet they have all kinds of crazy sensors and stuff, and they’d be really paranoid at night. If we get caught snooping around their camp during the day, it wouldn’t be great, but if we approach at night...”

“Good point,” Jake said. “Ax, best time to approach, diplomatically speaking?”

<Sunrise is probably an ideal time. If they are camped on the river, then most of them will probably perform the morning ritual in the open, so we can get a good estimate of how many are in this camp. After sunrise is also the traditional time for meetings and introductions.>

“Sunrise is... what, 6am?” Jake asked.

<Approximately seventeen of your minutes past six in the morning, Prince Jake,> Ax said. <Assuming I have correctly extrapolated from recent sunrises.>

“So we zip in before school, meet the Earth-saving warriors, then go to class,” Rachel said. “No problem.”

“How long will this take?” Marco asked.

“It can’t possibly take until school time,” Rachel said. “Right?” She glanced at Ax.

<I do not have the data to estimate how long introductions will take,> Ax said.

“Okay, let’s assume the worst, then,” Jake said. “We can’t all skip. The chee… dammit, they’re out of town, aren’t they. Okay. Ax, who’s the best at andalite sign language? Apart from you, I mean?”

<Cassie has the largest vocabulary. Tobias has the best understanding of structure and nuance.>

“Okay. Rachel and Marco, go to school. Ax, Tobias and Cassie are with me. Cassie, if anyone asked, you’re traumatised over the forest thing. I’m just being a teenage rebel, I guess.”

“Eventually the forest excuse is going to stop working,” I pointed out.

“We’ll come up with another excuse when that happens.”

“Jake, you’re going to get grounded if you skip school again,” Rachel said.

“Then we’ll just have to try to wrap up before school starts.”

“I can be Jake,” David said. “I’ve met way too many weird aliens lately.”

Jake didn’t look too happy about this, but he nodded. “Okay. Don’t do anything weird. My brother’s a controller, and we don’t need to give him any reason to be suspicious.” He held his arm out for David to acquire him.

“You’ve got classes with me all day tomorrow,” Rachel told Jake. “I’ll keep close to him in case anything happens.”

“Something happening?” Jake mumbled as the acquiring trance overtook him. “When does anything weird ever happen to us?”


	6. Chapter 6

“You’ve got some mail on the table,” Dad called as I trudged inside.

“Thanks,” I called. There were two letters. I snatched them up on my way to my room, taking care to close my door behind me.

The first bit of mail was a postcard from Yami. I tossed it onto my desk to read later. The second was in an envelope addressed using handwriting I didn’t recognise. The letters were bold and childish, scrawled in coloured pen. _Happy birthday!!_ was written on the back.

I frowned. I didn’t have any young cousins or anything who might have sent me a card. I opened the envelope carefully.

As expected, there was a birthday card inside. It was a pretty nice one, with a sort of 3D picture on the front made of several layers of coloured card. It was a butterfly.

I opened the card. The message was short.

_Hope yu and frends can by sumthing nise._

Inside the front of the card, a flat piece of plastic was taped. A bank card. I peeled it off; a four-digit number was scrawled on the card underneath it. The PIN, presumably. I’d never had a bank card before. The name on the card was “Annie Morf”.

Not very subtle. I knew immediately who had sent it, of course. I only knew one small child with lots of money to throw around who might know the term “Animorph”: Karen Wiltshire, the previous host of Aftran Nine Four Two. Apparently, she was helping more than just having her Dad fund the Rehabilitation Clinic.

I tucked the card, bank card included, into the back of a drawer to worry about later. I was collecting a lot of weird things in my room; ancient Egyptian artefacts, secret bank accounts under false names… I wondered what my parents would think if they ever searched my room. Nothing pointed to ‘alien-fighting guerilla’, but maybe I’d look like a smuggler or something. I’d have to find a better way to hide stuff.

But that was a future problem. For after we met up with the andalite fleet. For after the war was taken off our hands. For after tomorrow, when our role would change from ‘Earth’s big hope holding the line’ to ‘spokespeople trying to mitigate damage’, which was, at least, something far more in tune with my skill set.

Why wasn’t I more excited about this?

I had dinner with my parents, then snuck a sedative from the barn. I couldn’t afford not to get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow morning might be one of the most important missions of our careers as guerrilla warriors. But I’d barely put my head to my pillow when I opened my eyes under a bright sun, on a strange beach where the air tasted subtly wrong.

Okay. Okay. What did I have?

Not my ability to morph. Not my ability to heal. Not the other Animorphs. Not any idea of where I was.

No, no; not what didn’t I have. What did I have?

Not much. A slightly injured body. A shredded leotard and gloves.

Not a great situation, then. I had to… do something. What were you supposed to do in this situation? I’d learned some basic survival as a kid, but that had been so long ago… and that had been stuff like “if you get lost in the woods, stay right where you are,” which probably didn’t apply in this situation. What did I need? Food, water, shelter. Yeah. But in the opposite order. Shelter, then water, then food. That was right. I’d just have to do what they did on TV, and hope I survived.

Not far from the beach, sand gave way to light scrub, and beyond that, the green-and-orange canopy of a thick forest. I stumbled towards it, operating under the vague sense that cover would be safer. Stones and twigs cut up my feet as I walked. I was used to this, and ignored it until my footsteps became bloody and painful, then remembered – I couldn’t heal them with morphing. Even small injuries were a serious threat to my long-term survival. Argh, stupid move!

I pulled my gloves off and fashioned them into rough shoes. More like socks, really. They wouldn’t last long. I’d been spoiled by morphing; now I was going to have to be a lot more careful, a lot more resourceful.

Where were the other Animorphs? This had to be an Animorph thing, right? We’d been on a… mission I didn’t remember, or something, and…

Shelter and water first. I kept moving.

I didn’t venture far into the trees. I wanted to keep the beach nearby, in case the ocean had something useful. Maybe I could fetch water there to distill for drinking. It couldn’t be hard to distill water, right? It was just boiling it and catching steam.

Pity I didn’t know how to make fire.

I did know how to make a really good shelter, though. I’d helped Ax with his scoop enough to build pretty much anything out of wood. I climbed a short way up a tall, bristly tree that sort of resembled a pine but wasn’t (I still didn’t recognise any of the plants) and wove a platform large enough for me to lie on, and a primitive roof over it. It only took a couple of hours. It would’ve been faster if I’d had an axe or something.

Okay. Water. Fire? I could solve a lot of problems with fire. Pity I didn’t know how to make it. I’d have to find drinkable water another way. Somehow.

Somehow.

I looked over my cuts and scrapes. They weren’t bad. That is to say, they wouldn’t be bad if I were at home, with clean water and a first aid kit. Out here, a small infection could kill me. Was there civilisation anywhere around? There had to be, right? I had to have come from somewhere to end up out in the ocean. Maybe we’d been investigating another underwater yeerk base or something, or I’d been on the beach and there’d been a huge storm, or I’d fallen out of a Bug fighter or… okay, that last one didn’t necessarily mean there was civilisation nearby. But overall, the odds were good.

I inspected the trees around me a little more closely. There was something weird about them, other than me not knowing any of them. Something was bugging me. I dropped off my platform and headed for a large, broad-leaved tree, whose leaves were a shower of green, brown and gold.

The leaves. Yes, that was it. They were clearly deciduous, and changing for autumn. I inspected them a bit more closely – yes, it was definitely a seasonal change, not damage or infection. Pretty normal, I supposed.

Except that it was early spring.


	7. Chapter 7

My eyes flew open.

It was 5 in the morning. I had about half an hour before I had to meet the others. And now I might have time travel to deal with.

I told myself not to jump to conclusions. The first time I’d had the strange waking-up-on-the-beach dream, I’d assumed it was just that – a dream. But I’d dreamed of that place three times now, and events there seemed to follow a consistent, real-world logic. Odd dreams had, in the past, meant two things – telepathic alien messages, or time travel.

I groaned and reached for a notebook.

Okay. First up – alien message. Possible. When Ax had been trapped under the ocean, he’d sent a distress signal that Tobias and I had registered as a repetitive dream. So I supposed that step one was asking Tobias if he’d been dreaming anything similar.

But this dream wasn’t repetitive, it was… serial. It seemed like I was seeing snippets of different events that had occurred one after the other. That was more in line with Jake’s experience in the Amazon, but it wasn’t perfectly in line with them. For one thing, Jake had had visions throughout the day, not just when he was asleep. For another, he’d had them at the same time that his other self was experiencing them – if he saw something at 10am, then that thing was happening at 10am. If he saw something half an hour later, it was happening half an hour later. My visions weren’t like that; I was having dreams weeks apart of things that could only have happened perhaps half an hour apart. Besides, when Jake’s Sario rip thing had happened, I’d had a real sense of urgency, like we were running out of time to fix things. There was no ticking clock in my mind this time.

I could figure this out. I could figure this out. I wrote down every detail from the dream I remembered and then, cursing myself for not thinking to do so at the time, every detail I could remember from the previous dreams.

It had been early autumn. It was now late spring. Except… except in the dream, I’d been certain that it was early spring. So that meant… what? Two instances of time travel inside each other? That didn’t make any sense. Why had I thought it was early spring? Either way, early autumn to early spring didn’t necessarily mean time travel; it could also be travel in space. If I were in the Southern hemisphere – not an unreasonable possibility, since I was surrounded by plants I didn’t know – then that would account for the change of season. That made more sense than time travel anyway. Without the help of someone like Ellimist, time travel was supposed to be rare enough to be close to impossible; we’d already done our fair share of it.

So my dreams were… what, just me going crazy? No, that was a cop-out. Nothing that happened to us was ever that simple. Sure, none of us were mentally all together any more, but that just complicated our lives. It was never an answer that simplified anything. And if I couldn’t figure this out quickly, I was going to have to bring it to the group. It might be important. It might be dangerous.

But not yet. I didn’t want to fill everyone’s heads with yet another mystery right before we met up with the andalites. That could easily do more harm than good.

I got a couple of chores done (I didn’t know how much time I’d have in the next couple of days), then headed out to meet the other three – Jake, Ax and Tobias – at Ax’s scoop. Jake and Tobias were waiting for me.

<Where’s Ax?> I asked as I swooped down, my owl wings totally silent, to land on a branch.

<Doing a perimeter check,> Tobias told me. <One last sweep, you know? He’ll be back soon.> Tobias was still a red-tailed hawk. I supposed he was waiting to morph until right before we had to leave.

<Good,> Jake said. He shuffled between his little owl feet. Had he ever been this nervous? He must have been; we’d faced death multiple times. We’d faced andalites a few times. But this was different. This was andalites, here. Finally, they’d come.

<You know what andalites are like,> I told him privately. <It probably won’t matter that much what we say, we’re still gonna be a handful of dumb aliens. But we’re dumb aliens who know how this planet works and how the fight’s been going here. They’re going to have to listen to us.>

<Yeah,> Jake said, visibly settling. <They are.>

I gave him some quiet to put his Prince Jake mantle on. <Big day, huh?> I said privately to Tobias. <Everything changes.>

<I suppose so,> he said shortly. He preened a wing. <Ax is back.>

We’d all heard the approach. We weren’t surprised when Ax, walking slowly and uncertainly in the dark and peering about nervously with all four eyes, wove his way out of the trees.

<Okay,> Jake said. <Everyone clear on the plan?>

<Of course,> Tobias said briskly. He started to morph.

<Yes, Prince Jake.>

<I think so,> I said.

<Great. Let’s morph and, uh… right. Well, Tobias, lead the way when you’re ready.>

Tobias didn’t respond. He finished morphing owl, then waited for Ax to finish, then took off into the night. We followed, spreading out enough not to lead any birdwatcher directly to our destination, although the chances that anyone would notice us were practically non-existent.

<Tobias,> I asked while we flew, <is everything okay?>

<What? Yeah, why?>

<I don’t know, you just seem a bit…> I trailed off, not sure how to end my sentence. Nervous? Of course he was going to be nervous. We were all nervous. This was what we’d been waiting for ever since we’d walked through that construction site.

But nervous wasn’t right, was it? I watched him, out ahead and to my left, pump his wings once and drift away slightly, probably to pick up a bit of lift from a thermal. Tobias always went for thermals, no matter what kind of bird he was.

Driven? No. Angry.

<Did I do something to upset you?> I asked him privately.

<What? No!>

<Then what’s wrong?> I pressed, taking a gamble. It wasn’t always easy to get an Animorph to open up. They all had their own little tricky points. To talk to Jake, you had to be sure not to challenge his facade of perfect stoicism. You couldn’t make Rachel feel vulnerable or she’d turn it against you as anger. Ax’s alien thoughts and emotions only made sense to humans on the barest surface level, and to talk to Marco you had to phrase everything in a way that couldn’t in any way be interpreted as even the slightest possibility of you pitying him (and Marco could interpret any sign of compassion as pity). David was the easiest; if you stroked his ego, he’d tell you anything. Tobias was the second easiest. Tobias believed on some fundamental level that nobody was interested in how he felt, and that he’d be somehow punished or rejected for expressing feelings or desires. The easiest way I’d found to deal with this was to ask directly, and keep pressing until he was convinced you actually wanted to know. Sometimes he’d tell you. Sometimes he’d shut down. Either way, you’d get a pretty definitive answer.

<Nothing’s wrong,> he said, sounding annoyed. If this was Marco or Rachel, it’d be time to back off. But I knew Tobias. He wasn’t annoyed at me. He was expressing this now, so it was most likely about somebody on the mission. If it was Ax, they would’ve discussed it privately. Meaning…

<What did Jake do?> I asked. No, that couldn’t be right. If Jake had inadvertently upset Tobias’ feelings, Tobias would snap back or shut down. I tried again. <You don’t think we should be making contact like this?>

<Of course we have to make contact,> Tobias said. <It’s the only way forward.>

<But not like this.>

<No. Not like this.>

It was the biggest moment since meeting Elfangor. We had to be careful. We had to be… oh. We had to be there.

<You think we should all have come,> I concluded. He was upset that Rachel wasn’t there, that we wouldn’t be doing this together. As tactically smart as it was to keep some of our number in reserve, as much as we needed to continue to support our cover, this was the big Animorphs moment. All of the Animorphs should be there.

<You don’t think so?> he asked.

<Tactically speaking...>

<We need to keep a reserve, yes. And we needed to find a way to keep David out of the picture. We don’t know how he’d act around andalites. We can’t let him blow this for us. So Rachel and Marco have to be on babysitting duty.>

<You still don’t trust David?> I asked, baffled. <After everything he’s done for the cause?>

<Why does it matter what I think about David? Shutting him out of this was Jake’s plan, not mine.>

No, that wasn’t right. David’s absence was incidental, in case somebody needed to cover for Jake at school. David had even suggested it himself, hadn’t he? And Rachel and Marco were there to keep him safely out of the way while we did this mission. We’d been chosen for a perfectly logical reason; for our ability to speak Andalite.

But… with Ax present, why did the rest of the team’s fluency in the language matter? I tried to replay the barn meeting in my head, the conversation that had led to this team selection, but I couldn’t remember most of it.

Was he upset at Jake manipulating the team? Maybe. I didn’t think Jake was very manipulative; he’d always been fairly direct, with enough insight into his team to do his job and not much more than that. The idea that he could deliberately orchestrate something like the situation that Tobias was suggesting was laughable. Not even Marco would be able to do it. But if Tobias believed that Jake was manipulating the team like that, would that upset him?

No. Tobias already saw himself as a pawn. Nobody ever talked about it, but Tobias had never really believed in himself as a fundamentally worthy person. We all had our little side projects, but Tobias worked twice as hard as anyone else on the team, tracking controllers and scouting locations, proving his value over and over again. The only people he’d probably be upset about Jake manipulating were Rachel or Ax, and if he thought Rachel should be present, being our muscle instead of being ready to go to school, he’d just have said that in the meeting.

Ax, then? But Ax was on the mission. Did Tobias think he shouldn’t be here, introducing us to his people? There were reasons to keep them apart, I supposed… Ax had taken the fall for giving us the ability to morph, so his people were unlikely to look upon him kindly. But it wasn’t like we should, or could, keep them apart. We needed him here; the rest of us didn’t know andalite culture well enough to proceed without him. And wouldn’t it be worse to keep him away from his people?

<Are you worried about Ax?> I asked Tobias.

<Of course I’m worried about Ax. He’s been stranded on a foreign planet for forever, alone.>

<He has us.>

<Yeah, he does, and that’s something, but… Cassie, you’re a human. You’ve got a family and an entire planet and millions of years of slowly developing culture behind you. Ax doesn’t have any of that. The closest thing he’s got is me, and two stranded misfits can only sort of keep each other company; they’re mostly just alone together. How would you feel if we went to Leera, and the bomb thing didn’t work, and the snapback thing didn’t happen and everyone else died except you? And you had to kind of integrate yourself into the local forces, join some group of Leerans or andalites or something, with no real timetable on getting home, no promise that it was ever possible? Just you, on a foreign planet, where trying to relate to anyone on any level was a huge effort?>

I thought about this. <Yeah,> I said. <That would be really, really hard.>

<So you integrate yourself. And your human ways tend to frustrate people, so you make yourself as Leeran as possible. Then, someday, miracle of miracles, a bunch of humans show up. You run into one of them, and they’re not hugely helpful, but it’s the first human contact you’ve had in forever, and your group tracks down their group and your commanding officer comes up to you and says, ‘We need you to come and be our cultural translator.’ And you say, ‘Okay, but my judgement on everything is going to be a little clouded.’ And your commanding officer says, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’ve already sworn your loyalty to me, I know you’ll stick around with us; this doesn’t change anything.’ How would you feel then?>

Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.

<Have you discussed this with Jake?> I asked Tobias.

<Discussed what with Jake? He’s the one making Ax stay. He knows what’s up more than any of the rest of us.>

<I don’t think he does, actually,> I protested. <He’s been trying to be really supportive of Ax. I don’t think he’s considered that perspective.>

<Yeah, well, he should have,> Tobias said stiffy. Then he went silent. I hoped he was talking to Jake.

We kept following the river, racing the sunrise. I wondered vaguely whether we’d passed over the area where I had dragged myself out of the flooding waters with Karen and Aftran a lifetime ago, but I had no idea where in the forest that was, or how to identify the area by air. Around us, the night was silent. Not even my feathers rustled in the wind.

<We’re coming up on them,> Tobias announced after some time. <See that dead tree over there? If you look behind it, you’ll see that the tree branches become unusually regular. Their ship is hidden under there.>

I looked. It took a little while to see what he was talking about. There was a small patch where branches wove together in a way that was just a little bit unnatural, completely covering an area that I was pretty sure didn’t have any trees in it.

<Aximili, tell us what to do,> Jake said, his mental voice monotone and businesslike.

<Wait here,> Ax said, pulling ahead. He flew a lap around the area, then returned. <It is a small ship, probably an advance scout setting up for a larger landing. Crew is likely between three and seven individuals. This should make contact easier as they aren’t completely established yet. It may also mean that they don’t have all of their perimeter defenses up yet. That is the most likely interpretation.>

<Any other likely interpretations?> Jake asked.

<They could be using a more distributed setup,> Ax said. <There could be a dozen or more small camps like this one, set up to work semi-independently. They are clearly launching a land assault, but it is difficult to determine what type without further information.>

<Okay,> Jake said. <Aximili, you’re with me on the ground. Cassie and Tobias, monitor from the sky.> Jake and Ax dropped down under the treeline.

The sun was rising. I risked perching on a branch by the river and saw four andalites file out from under the trees to the edge of the water.

The andalite at the head of the procession looked about Elfangor’s age. He was tense and businesslike. Like Ax, he scanned his environment with his stalk eyes even as his main eyes turned to the rising sun, though there was no way he could see it through all the trees. He had the shiniest tailblade and hooves I’d ever seen on an andalite, and I wondered whether he oiled them or something.

The andalite next to him looked old. It was hard to be sure in the faint light of the sunrise, but patches of his blue fur were missing, revealing shorter tan fur underneath, a tan matching his eyes that were in contrast to the bright green of the others. A chip was missing from his dull tailblade. He was far more relaxed than the leading andalite. He followed the progress of something in a nearby tree with one eye, looking vaguely amused, but otherwise paid little attention to his surroundings.

The third andalite looked much like the leader in age and build. He was perhaps a bit stockier. He was also just as tense, eyes scanning the forest around him. He carried a weapon in his right hand, something that looked a lot like a Dracon beam, and took care to keep his place between the other andalites as if terrified that something might leap out and attack them and he’d need the herd to shield him.

The final andalite must have been Estrid-Corrill-Darrath, I decided, based on the fact that she was the only female present. I had met an andalite female before, and knew what to expect. Andalites were not a very dimorphic species, at least not in any way that was obvious to human eyes; she was smaller than the males, but that might have been a function of age. Her tailblade was finer, her hooves broader. The most distinctive difference, although it wasn’t easy to see in the faint light, was that her fur was a different shade, more of a violet than a pale blue. From my experience with Chieftainess Keilin, I knew this was actually a third coat – males like Ax had two coats, a pale blue over a far shorter and finer white coat. (Or tan, I supposed, in the case of the older andalite… a function of age? Or maybe different andalites had different colour undercoats?) Cheiftainess Keilin had had a third, even longer violet coat, and had trimmed parts of her hair different lengths to create intricate, three-coloured designs all over her body. This girl had not cut her fur in such a way; it was as plain and unadorned as the other andalites, merely more purple. She stared straight ahead with all four eyes, studiously awaiting the start of the ritual.

The first andalite began, the others quickly joining in. Their thoughtspeak was public, but quiet, the radius kept small.

<From the water that gave birth to us,> they chanted, each dipping a hoof into the river. <From the grass that feeds us.> There was not a great deal of grass cover on the riverbank, but they each managed to find a tuft to crush. <For the freedom that unites us.> They spread their arms wide, the nervous andalite having to put his gun on his back first to do so. <We rise to the stars.> Four andalite faces turned to the sunrise, sixteen eyes watching the gold on the very tops of the trees.

<Right,> the leader said after several seconds. <Posts.>

The moment of solemnity had passed. The four broke up, then froze as a unit at the sound of something smacking against wood, extremely close by. The armed andalite aimed his weapon into the trees. The leader flicked his tail, and the armed andalite reluctantly lowered the weapon.

<Come,> the leader said.

Ax walked out onto the riverbank, tail carefully lowered in the andalite equivalent of a hands-up gesture. Only once he was in clear view did he raise it to snap off a complicated-looking salute to the clear leader. <I am Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill,> Ax said.

<He’s the one who saved me!> Estrid said excitedly, stepping forward. The andalites around her, including Ax, all froze at her words. The leader looked furious and turned a stalk eye towards her. She stepped back.

<Why don’t you go and check the engines, Estrid?> the elder andalite said quickly.

<Right,> Estrid said. <Of course.> She saluted with her tail and headed for the concealed ship.

The leader turned his attention back to Ax. <I am Commander Gonrod-Isfall-Sonilli. My warriors are Intelligence Advisor Arbat-Elivat-Estoni, and Aloth-Attamil-Gahar.> He indicated the other two andalites; first the elder one, then the armed one. <I believe that you have met _aristh_ Estrid-Corrill-Darrath. Why are you here, and how did you find us? >

<One of my cousins is very adept at aerial surveillance,> Ax said. <He followed your _aristh_ to determine your location. >

<Who?> Commander Gonrod asked, <and how?>

Before Ax could answer this question, Jake stepped out of the trees. “My apologies,” he said. “I believe that Aximili neglected to answer your first question.”

<Of course,> Ax said. <Commander Gonrod, this is my Prince, Jake-Richard-Berenson. He wished to meet with you.>

The three andalites stared, with all twelve of their eyes, at Jake.

<This is an alien,> Gonrod pointed out. <An alien cannot be your Prince.>

“I’m a human, a native of this planet,” Jake said. “You are the aliens here.”

<I know what you are, human Jake,> Gonrod said, <and you are not an andalite Prince, or even a warrior. _Aristh_ Aximili, under _nerien_ , you are now under my command. Enter the ship; you will be briefed on our mission later.>

<My apologies, Commander Gonrod, but my allegiance is to my Prince until he says otherwise,> Ax said firmly.

Gonrod trembled with rage. I noticed that, behind him, Aloth was fingering his weapon. Arbat had a similar gun, and had taken up a position to one side, a little further out. I could see Estrid in the doorway of the ship, apparently unable to resist the temptation of spectating; she had a gun, too.

<You will cease insulting the highest ranking andalite warrior within light-years by announcing your allegiance to a human child, and you will obey orders as you have been trained!> Gonrod bellowed. Ax shrank back, then stood to attention. Jake stepped between Gonrod and Ax. If Jake was intimidated at all, he was hiding it really well.

“Aximili,” he said, “explain the andalite rank of Commander to me.”

<A Commander is most often in charge of a single ship,> Ax said, disappointment clear in his voice. He’d realised what I had, what Jake presumably had. <A small ship.>

“And you are the highest ranking andalite within light-years, Commander Gonrod?” Jake asked.

Arbat laughed. <So much for tricking the enemy into thinking they are outnumbered!>

“We aren’t the enemy,” Jake said. “And you’d be hard-pressed to outnumber our enemy, in any case.”

<True enough,> the intelligence advisor agreed.

Gonrod struggled to regain control of the conversation. < _Aristh_ Aximili, inform this human that we are not prepared to discuss strategic matters with him. >

<Prince Jake is the leader of the human resistance on Earth, Commander,> Ax replied respectfully. <Not coordinating between forces could cause complications in attempting to fight our common enemy.>

Gonrod glared at him. _Arisths_ , I knew, weren’t supposed to speak out of turn or give unsolicited advice; to do so was insubordination. But Ax wasn’t Gonrod’s _aristh_ , he was Jake’s warrior, and he was standing his ground.

<And how many warriors does he lead?> Gonrod asked Ax.

“Not enough,” Jake said bluntly. Arbat chuckled again.

<No. Not enough. But morph-capable.> Gonrod reluctantly addressed Jake. <I was briefed on your appearance on the Ascalin. An entire ship of capable andalite warriors strategically destroyed, almost costing us Leera, and you humans and your pet Seerow here the only survivors. What am I supposed to make of that, hmm?>

Jake didn’t respond to the challenge. He crossed his arms, looking thoughtful. “Leera is in the past,” was all he said. “More warriors died than was necessary, and that is a very sad thing. But their sacrifice was not in vain, and an entire planet is now safe from the yeerks.”

<And the yeerks deprived of some extremely dangerous hosts.>

“That, too.”

<Despite extreme ecological damage to the planet.>

Jake shrugged. “Again, very regrettable. But when the alternative is the yeerks...”

<Good. Then you and your warriors will help us to liberate this planet.>

“That’s what we’ve been doing. What do you need?”

<How many warriors are under your command?>

“How many of us do you need? What’s the plan?”

<That isn’t what I asked.>

Jake frowned. “No, it’s what I asked. We’re here to fight yeerks, Commander. If you’re here to fight yeerks, we’re happy to coordinate. If you have something you want us to do, tell me what it is, and we’ll consider it. But my people aren’t your pawns. We’ve been holding this planet just fine and will continue to do so, with or without your help. Preferably with your help. So what’s the plan, and what do you need us to do?”

<We need you to stay out of our way,> Gonrod said firmly. <We will conduct our business, then leave. Until then, do not interfere.>

Jake shrugged. “I can’t make any promises on halting our plans for yours, especially if you won’t tell me what they are,” he said, “but if you’re so sure that you don’t need extra hands, then the best of luck to you. Aximili, we’re leaving.”

<Aximili, get in the ship,> Gonrod said firmly.

<But my Prince – >

<I do not have time to babysit an _aristh_ ’s delicate feelings!> Gonrod snapped. <You were weak and lonely enough to break our most sacred law and create an insulting alien puppet Prince for yourself whose incompetence took a good andalite ship out of the sky, losing us dozens of warriors and almost an entire planet; that alone should tell you that the best possible military decision you could make right now is to follow the orders of your uncles who know better! Get in the ship, right now, or I will hold you in breach of command, although at the rate that you are amassing military crimes it seems you’ll be taking up the time of a full military tribunal for the rest of your career by the time you get off this planet!>

Ax gave him a long look. Then he turned to follow Jake back into the trees.

<Aloth, Arbat, stun _aristh_ Aximili, > Gonrod ordered.

I looked at Aloth and Arbat. Both were armed, but neither had raised their weapons. My keen owl eyes, primed to see exactly this sort of thing, immediately picked out why.

<Unfortunately, Commander Gonrod, I am being prevented from firing my weapon,> Arbat said mildly. <I believe that Aloth is similarly situated.> He was looking at the same thing I’d noticed; the rattlesnake curled around one of his legs. Aloth did indeed have his own rattlesnake, as did Estrid.

I picked up Jake’s baffled expression. <Jake,> I told him privately, <rattlesnakes, on their legs.>

He glanced down and quickly hid his surprise. He nodded. “I don’t know how many venomous animals you have on the andalite homeworld,” he said, “but those animals can kill an andalite with a single bite. We know for a fact that their poison works on your kind. And andalite tails are very fast, but rattlesnake strikes are much faster. We’ve tested that, too.” This wasn’t technically true; contrary to popular belief, a snake strike isn’t all that fast and relies mostly on surprise. But the andalites didn’t know that any better than Jake did.

Gonrod narrowed all four of his eyes. Jake stepped forward.

“Listen,” Jake said in a tone of perfect, icy calm. “I’ve been trying to deal fairly with you, because we are fighting a common enemy and ideally should do so together. But let’s get some things straight here. This is our planet, not your battleground. It’s our planet, and we will protect it from any threats. Right now, the big threat is the yeerks. But our goal is to protect the planet from _any_ threats. Understand? You have insulted the integrity and competence of my people based on obviously incomplete and false information. You don’t know how many of us there are, you clearly have no idea what we did on Leera, and you dare to insinuate that the Ascalin was our fault? You don’t even have the background knowledge to understand just how insulting that is. And no, I’m not going to tell you, because your government obviously doesn’t think you need to know the whole story, or they would have told it to you, and the last thing I need right now is diplomatic issues. You dare to – no, shut up. Shut. Up. You dare to insult the decisions of Warrior Aximili? You have no idea of the context of those decisions, either. Aximili has proven himself an exceptional soldier with a very clear head operating under some extremely trying circumstances, not the least of which is dealing with people like you.” Jake’s voice rose sharply, and he was suddenly yelling in Gonrod’s face. “And you dare – you DARE – to order an _attack_ on one of my people?! You can’t handle the idea of something happening outside your immediate command so much that you throw a tantrum and try to shoot Aximili? No. That nonsense stops right now!”

Gonrod’s tail twitched. I could see in his eyes just how badly he wanted to use it. How much he wanted to press it to Jake’s throat, or maybe knock Jake out. Jake could see the expression too, and didn’t flinch. Gonrod couldn’t move, not with those rattlesnakes on his people. If he attacked their Prince, what would stop them from killing his team?

<What do you want?> Gonrod asked finally.

“You’re not the andalite fleet,” Jake said. “You were briefed on our possible presence, poorly, but your _aristh_ had no idea we were here. So what exactly are you doing here?”

I glanced at the other andalites. Aloth and Estrid looked embarrassed by their commander’s behaviour, eyes and tails drooping, a lot of their weight shifted to their more delicate front legs. Nobody looked too bothered by the rattlesnakes. Arbat looked like he found the whole situation hilarious. When Gonrod turned a stalk eye to him, he merely said in an amused tone, <As your intelligence officer, my advice would be open cooperation. This Jake alien has demonstrated an upper hand on all levels.>

<We are a covert assassination team,> Gonrod admitted, his voice carefully neutral.

“You’re an assassin?” Jake asked, some disbelief in his voice.

<I am the team’s commander. Aloth is our assassin.>

“And your target?”

<An andalite. Alloran-Semitur-Corrass.>

Jake nodded. “Visser Three’s host.”

<And my brother,> Arbat said.


	8. Chapter 8

Gonrod turned to glare at Arbat with his main eyes. <Do not give away privileged information!> he snapped.

<Ah, yes,> Arbat replied, <because this whole meeting has been a pinnacle class in not giving away privileged information.> There was something under his amusement – contempt. Arbat wasn’t taking the situation seriously because he couldn’t take his commander seriously.

Gonrod continued to glare, which Arbat ignored. Aloth was busying himself checking his weapon, while Estrid openly watched the fight with all four eyes. Gonrod and Aloth continued to scan the environment with their stalk eyes, but nobody was paying particular attention to Jake, who was still standing in front of Ax. He was signing one-handed to Ax, behind his back where the other andalites couldn’t see. His signs were far too clumsy for me to make any meaning out of them. I hoped that Ax understood.

“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” Jake cut in companionably, interrupting the glarefest. I wondered if the glimmer of fury still present in his eyes was as obvious to the andalites as it was to me. “Aximili, you are honor-bound to kill Visser Three due to the murder of your brother, Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, are you not?”

The namedrop worked. Jake had the attention of the whole andalite force again.

<I am,> Ax said.

“And Arbat, am I correct in assuming that you are honor-bound to free your brother in death?”

<You could put it that way, yes.>

“In that case, personal issues aside and little as I like to say it… it would be highly dishonorable of me to stand between one of my people and his duty. Gonrod, I would consider it a personal favour if you would accept Aximili’s assistance with this mission.”

<Of course,> Gonrod said.

“Thank you. Aximili, Gonrod is your Commander for the time being. Behave with honor.”

<Always, Prince Jake.>

“Until we meet again, then. Commander Gonrod, my team will stay away from the Yeerk Pool for the immediate future to keep out of your way, but I can’t hold our plans back forever.” He looked to the snakes. “You lot, meet up with the warriors in the trees and get to our usual meeting place. I’ll meet you there shortly.”

The warriors all managed to hide their surprise well. But I noticed them start to search the trees with their stalk eyes. Only then did I make sense of Jake’s words; he was reminding the andalites that the handful of us they’d seen didn’t necessarily represent our entire force.

Apart from Ax, we all withdrew, finding safe places to morph and putting on our daytime wings. As soon as he had thoughtspeak, Jake exploded.

<What were you three doing here?!> he snapped. <You were supposed to be getting ready for school!>

<When you were doing the First Contact thing?> David said. <As if.>

<We saved your butt back there,> Rachel reminded Jake, flapping her huge wings and taking off. <What was your plan to stop them from shooting Ax, hmm?>

<And now we have plenty of time to get back and get to school,> Marco said. <It all worked out, see?>

<That’s not the point!>

<Jake,> I reminded him privately, <you’re not angry at them.> Jake never shouted at us. To the group, I added, <Let’s save our energy for the yeerks, yeah?>

<And those andalites,> Marco growled. <Did you hear the garbage they were spouting about us?>

<And about Ax!> Tobias added. <They were going to shoot him! It’s lucky you were all there, honestly, because I was so close to ripping some stalk eyes right off their – >

<But Jake totally kicked butt,> Rachel crowed. <Did you guys hear that whole speech where he tore Gonrod a new one? Did you guys hear that whole conversation? That was amazing!>

<It was pretty basic,> Jake mumbled. <And, yeah, it wouldn’t have worked if you guys hadn’t been there.>

<Basic?> Rachel said. <It was awesome!>

<You were pretty on the ball when it came to getting information,> Marco added. <I don’t think they were quite ready for you. They expected Ax to tell them everything they wanted to know and you to just stay out of it. They had no idea.>

<Speaking of Ax,> I cut in, <what were you telling him to do with the signing back there?>

<I didn’t tell him to do anything,> Jake said. <I asked him if he wanted to work with the andalites and kill Visser Three. I wasn’t going to force him to go.> He tilted his head, glancing briefly at Tobias who was rising on a thermal out to his left.

<I can’t believe you just gave away our alien,> David said. <He’s the guy who knows everything. How are we going to get anything done now?>

<I didn’t give him away,> Jake said. <He can make his own decisions. But killing Visser Three is important to him. I wasn’t going to stand in his way.>

<And when he kills Visser Three, then what?>

<That’ll be up to Ax.>

<I meant, what happens to us? Visser Three is a terrifying son of a bitch, but he also appears to be absolutely bonkers. So what happens when he dies? Do the yeerks ship in some other, smarter Visser? Or is there a power vacuum while people jockey for position? Is this going to be a good thing or a bad thing for us?>

<I don’t know,> Jake admitted.

<You don’t _know_? Are you leading the fight for freedom or not? >

<You know what, David?> Jake snapped. <That can be your personal project, if you want; trying to figure out how the yeerk command structure works, and what happens when Visser Three dies. Reckon you have the information to figure it out? Well neither do I.>

<I bet Ax does,> David said.

Marco cut in before Jake could reply. <So long as Chapman doesn’t end up in charge of the invasion. If our assistant principal is leading the invasion of Earth, then we are officially part of a world that I don’t want to be a part of.>

<As opposed to the one we have now, which is clearly going great?> Rachel asked. <Have you even done that book report for English yet?>

<Pfft, it’s like, two pages. I’ll do it at lunch.>

<Wait,> I said, <we had a book report?>

<You can copy mine,> Rachel said. <We’ll reword things so it looks like we just reached the same conclusions.>

<Book reports,> David said dismissively. <Man, I do not miss school.>

<We need a system for this,> Tobias said. <School is taking up way too much of your time. We need to deal with this homework issue before you all start failing.>

<Are you volunteering to do mine?> Marco asked.

<Are you volunteering to pay me?> Tobias responded.

<Ah, yes,> Jake said. <Academic fraud. Cassie, explain to the children why cheating is wrong.>

<Actually, I think Tobias is right,> I said. <One way or the other, school is never going to matter for us in the way it’s supposed to. It doesn’t matter while we’re fighting this war, it definitely won’t matter if we lose, and even if we win… well, we don’t know what that world is going to look like, but I think ‘can turn into animals at will’ is going to be higher on our resume than ‘got an A-plus for a book report’. I’m sure there’s stuff we’re supposed to be learning that we’ll need to know in the future, but it’s stuff that it would be better for us to learn when we’re not fighting a war. School’s just a cover at this point. Why not cheat?>

<Why go at all?> David asked. <When the chee get back, just send some of them to school. Be full-time superheroes.>

<I think the chee have their own lives to lead,> I pointed out.

<Yeah, fake lives. They’re just robots. They can fake your lives as well as a made-up life.>

<It would be way too complicated,> Rachel said. <We’d have to time leaving the house and returning to coincide with chee movements, share and memorise enough information that we could answer offhand questions about the school day… it’s a lot less complicated to just keep doing what we’re doing. And really, who cares if we fail a class? It’s an awkward lecture by a parent. It’s not really going to matter.>

<You’re maintaining an A average,> Tobias reminded her.

<Yeah, barely. It used to be A-plus.>

<Oh, no. The horrors of war.>

By the time we got back to the barn, the sun was well and truly in the sky. Tobias had already headed for his meadow; the others headed off to get ready for school, and David headed back to the Kings’ house. I kept Jake back.

“Can we talk?” I asked him.

He glanced at the sky. There was still a good hour or so before he would have to get ready for school. “Uh, sure. What’s up?”

“A lot of things. So many things. But first… are you feeling okay?”

“What? Yeah. Of course.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’d tell you if I wasn’t.”

I raised an eyebrow. Jake sighed.

“I’m… a little worried,” he admitted.

“About the andalites?”

“Yeah. Not those guys,” he said, gesturing toward the forest. “Just everything in general, you know? I thought… I mean, I tried not to hope, but when we ran into that actual andalite in the mall...”

I nodded. “We’d been waiting for so long. But they’re not here to save us.”

“I was hoping that there would at least be several little groups, you know? Because Ax picked up that communication? I was hoping it might be between ships, not just between individuals. But we have this assassination team, and to be honest, I don’t think they have this whole thing under control. They don’t seem prepared for this at all.”

I nodded.

“And the way they were treating Ax is really not cool. They think he broke Seerow’s Kindness.”

“We already knew that, though. He took the blame to protect Elfangor’s reputation.”

“But we didn’t know about Leera. Did you hear the stuff Gonrod was saying about Leera? I don’t think he knows we ever even reached the surface of that planet. He definitely doesn’t know about the traitor captain on the Ascalin, which doesn’t surprise me, but he very strongly implied that he thinks we did something to bring down that ship, then mysteriously vanished.”

“Do you care what Gonrod thinks?” I asked.

“No. But I care what he’s been taught. Estrid had no idea we existed. Gonrod was warned of our presence, but in a way that made us out to be incompetent at best and possible enemies at worst, and was told that the only andalite here was some kid who had broken their most sacred interspecies law. We haven’t heard a blip about Earth from the andalites since Elfangor, and now this tiny crew shows up to perform a single assassination, containing a female _aristh_ , which according to Ax means very, very dire things for andalite manpower.”

“So?” I prompted.

“So, the andalites are apparently suffering a shortage of soldiers, fighting a war on many fronts, we haven’t seen or heard anything about Earth and when this team shows up nobody even tries to inform us, and the resistance force out here is being either obscured or lied about, made to look like a bunch of pathetic traitors? Cassie, I’m starting to think that the andalites might have given up on Earth.

“I’m starting to think that maybe the andalites aren’t coming. Ever.”


	9. Chapter 9

I felt myself freeze. So that I’d have something to do with my hands, I reached for a broom, and started to sweep the barn.

“Sorry,” Jake said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, no, you should have,” I said. “I want you to be honest with me.” _Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh;_ dust billowed in my wake. The idea that the andalites might not come… I hadn’t even considered that. But I should have, shouldn’t I? What reason did we have to think that the andalites would ever come? The faith of an _aristh_ who didn’t know any better, and the words of a dying Prince from two years ago? Battle plans changed. Priorities changed.

Jake fell into step next to me with a second broom. Together, we moved across the floor, probably leaving big dusty missed patches in our wake. I didn’t care.

What reason did I have to believe that the andalites were coming? I had to think about this logically. Rationally. Impossible, I knew. I didn’t have the information to make a proper determination; I didn’t have the detachment to avoid being influenced by hope or despair. But I did have one pretty good argument.

“Remember when Ax first got here, and we bought him that almanac?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“Well, after he read it, he came to see me. We were talking about other things, but he kind of hinted that humans scared him, a little.”

“Because of our wars and stuff, you mean?”

“No, not that. I think all these aliens should be way more worried about that, but they don’t seem to care. No, he was worried about the amount of time it took humans to get into space. Apparently, we do things really fast, compared to other species. Really, really fast. He didn’t tell me how long it took andalites to make the same progress, but he did say that it was a lot longer. He said… he said that he thought there might be a reason the yeerks targeted us, beyond just our low tech level making it easy to infiltrate. He thought that they might be looking at a future where they could vastly outstrip everyone else’s technology, through use of our brains. And Visser Three’s given different reasons before, too, remember? Specifically, our numbers, adaptability, and endurance. There are billions of us, we breed like rabbits, we can eat pretty much anything, and our ability to heal injury and resist disease is insane – not hork-bajir level, but better than pretty much anything else. We develop tech at an unbelievable rate, and we adapt socially even faster – just look at how you beat Gonrod at his own game today. I know in my heart that the andalites are coming to save us, for the same reason they tried so hard to help the hork-bajir. For the same reason they saved the Leerans. They have to save us – they can’t afford to let us fall into yeerk hands.”

Jake smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But they couldn’t save the hork-bajir.”

“Then we’ll have to do as much of the work as possible before they get here, and increase our chances,” I said.

“And they had to blow up the entire land mass of Leera.”

“Nobody lived there. I guess the equivalent would be destroying our oceans? We can’t afford to do something like that to our planet. Again, we’ll have to fight hard and make it unnecessary.”

Jake nodded. “It’s what we’re good at.”

“Yeah. It is. You think Ax is doing okay?”

“Getting a shot at Visser Three? I bet he’s doing great.”

“And after they complete their mission?”

Jake was silent for several seconds. “Like I said,” he said finally. “That’s up to him.”

“Yeah. Oh, by the way, I have something you should see. Wait here.”

I dashed inside and grabbed the birthday card from Karen. I handed it to him with a quick explanation.

“How much money is on it?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know how to check.”

“You should go to the mall after school and find out. Anything else?”

“Um… yeah, actually.” I told him about my dreams of being in a strange place, unable to morph. There wasn’t time to go into a lot of depth. “I wouldn’t mention them,” I said apologetically, “but whenever we get weird dreams, it’s always...”

“Alien messages, or time travel, or Ellimist, or something,” Jake finished, nodding. “Yeah, we should ask Ax about this, after. Or… you know. Work on it.”

I nodded. “If it happens again, I’ll try to remember as much as I can, see if anything at all is familiar.”

“Yeah. Good call.” Jake glanced outside. “I’d better get home and get ready for school.”

I nodded. “See you in class?”

“See you in class.”

Where we’d all have to pretend, once again, that a war wasn’t happening around us.


	10. Chapter 10

School was okay. At lunch I wrote a hastily reworded version of Rachel’s paper while Jake and Marco sat at the other end of the table writing theirs. It was supposed to be about Hatchet, which I hadn’t read. Maybe I should. Maybe the knowledge would help me in the weird non-morphing world.

Rachel and I went to the mall after school. I wanted to try Karen’s bank card. Rachel wanted to buy new jeans.

“I feel like we should be doing something,” Rachel muttered on our way to the mall, as soon as the street around us was clear. “They’re out there killing our greatest enemy and we’re sitting on our hands like good little kids.”

“There’s a lot of missions we could do,” I pointed out. “We could chase up the Gazzette thing. Look for supply ships. Grab some random controllers, stick them in the shack. Visser Three’s death is going to be the ultimate distraction.”

“If they can pull it off,” Rachel said.

“Yeah.”

“But none of that is the point. We should be in there, killing him. Have these guys ever fought Visser Three? Do they have any idea what he’s capable of?”

“One of them is Alloran’s brother,” I pointed out.

“Big whoop. You think Alloran ever turned into huge monsters and ate his enemies alive before he became a controller? I doubt it. He probably walked daintily around and gave speeches about honor.” She stopped walking to readjust her school bag. “You know what Jake’s going to suggest, don’t you? Visser Three dying, huge distraction, left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.”

“Yeah. He’s going to want to rescue Tom.” A kid was approaching; I stopped talking until he’d passed and was well out of earshot. “Do you think it’s a good idea?”

“Who cares if it’s a good idea? It’ll work. Tom’s my cousin. Every day I want to tear the yeerks apart more and more for what they’re doing to him. And if we grab him now, then even if the attempt of Visser Three fails, it looks like it was part of the plan, right? A distraction. Not suspicious at all. It’s going to be perfect.” She wrinkled her nose. “But we’ll never get to see the look on Visser Three’s face when he faces certain death. That’s the price, I guess.”

“You mean on Alloran’s face.”

“He begged Ax to kill him when he had the chance. Those assassins will be doing him a favor.”

“Do you trust them? The assassins?”

“They’re not working with the yeerks, or Jake would already be a controller, and his memories would’ve gotten the rest of us caught by now,” Rachel said. “So yeah. Common enemy, right? They can’t come and save us quite yet, but at least they’re doing this part to make it easier until they get here. They might not like Jake, but they want to kill Visser Three. They want the Earth out of yeerk hands. That’s all that matters.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “Now let’s see this magical moneymaking birthday card.”

I handed her the birthday card, bank card still inside. She looked them over. “Huh.”

“What?” I asked.

“I just never expected to hear from that little girl again. You know? She went through some pretty terrifying stuff with the yeerks, and then with us. I thought she’d want to forget the whole thing.”

“I don’t think she had much more choice than we do. We can morph and we know, so we have to fight. She has money and she knows, so...”

“Fair enough.” She handed the card back. “It’d probably be immoral to use money meant for the cause on clothes, wouldn’t it?”

“Um, yes? Very much so.”

“Pity. Because yesterday I saw this cute top that’s exactly your shade of blue, and it’s on sale...”


	11. Chapter 11

The card had a little over two hundred dollars on it. I relayed this to the others when we gathered in Marco’s room later that night. His father was out on a date with Nora, so we had the place to ourselves for a few hours.

“Okay,” Jake said. “Good to know. Thanks, Cassie.” He rubbed his temples. He’d been pacing back and forth restlessly.

“So,” Rachel prompted, “do we have a mission?”

“Yeah.” Jake looked over the assembled Animorphs. “We need to rescue David’s parents.”

I stared. Rachel jumped to her feet.

“Come again?” she asked.

“David’s parents. His mom works at the gardens. While we’re staying away from the Yeerk Pool, we have a chance to grab her. His dad will be harder.”

“Jake, you know as well as I do that this is the perfect time to get Tom. It’s the one time it wouldn’t be at all suspicious to – ”

“Tom isn’t in immediate danger,” Jake interrupted. “David’s parents are.”

Rachel crossed her arms. “How so?”

“The yeerks know who I am,” David said. “They don’t know any of you. They know who I am and they have my parents. They’ve already tried to bribe me with them. The next obvious step is to threaten to hurt or kill them. Visser Three doesn’t seem to have figured that out, but his replacement will probably have two brain cells to rub together. Can you think of a better way for a new leader to make a name for himself than to capture the legendary morphing human?”

“That’s garbage,” Rachel said. “If that were a viable plan, Visser Three would have done it. Threatening people is his favourite – ”

“He has a point,” I said. “We can’t afford to take that kind of risk. If Visser Three might actually get killed, we should try to get them out before he’s replaced.” I ignored Rachel’s glare, meeting Jake’s eyes instead. I had seen Jake’s dilemma. David had been a brave and competent Animorph on several counts, but he was reckless, vicious and clearly didn’t like most of us. He’d caved to Visser Three’s threats when he was new – that made sense, to a degree; nobody reacted well to Visser Three at first. But he was still very new. Tom was safe, for now, and Jake and Rachel wouldn’t betray us for Tom’s sake. We could all be sure of that. Could we be sure of David, if he had to choose between his parents and the kids who had drafted him into a war? Best not to find out. Best to avoid any chance of the situation arising.

“Hey,” Marco spoke up. “Geniuses. You’re all missing the obvious.”

“Which is what?” Rachel asked impatiently.

“We don’t know when the hit is going down, do we? I’d imagine that taking out Visser Three needs a lot of preparation. We don’t know how long the andalites have been here; they could move tomorrow, or in three weeks.”

<What’s your point?> Tobias asked.

“My point is, why not grab them all? Get David’s parents right away. Find out when the hit is going down. Get Tom the day before, so they’ll think it’s part of a distraction for the hit.”

“But like you said,” Rachel said, “we don’t know when the andalites are attacking.”

“Parents or not, we’d still need to know that before going for Tom, right?”

<We need to spy on the andalites,> Tobias said. <I don’t think they’d tell us outright.>

“Uh,” David broke in, “Jake gave away our alien, remember? If Ax notices us, he’ll report us to his precious commander.”

<He would probably have to, yes,> Tobias said, <but we’ve been in this situation before, and secretly following Ax saved everyone’s lives, including his. I bet that Ax is putting a lot of effort into not noticing weird animals right now. He’s probably hanging out in isolated areas with a lot of bugs every ninety minutes or so, and telegraphing all his actions in advance, and having a lot of ‘as you know’ conversations with the others, just in case. I bet he won’t notice a thing if we give him any way to possibly avoid it.>

Jake nodded. “Okay. Marco, Cassie, Tobias; you’re on andalite-spying duty. Take shifts. David, Rachel; we’re on the rescue. We’re going to need the element of surprise and we’re going to need to find a way to get both parents at the same time, so the yeerks don’t figure out what’s happening and hide the other one.”

“Sounds impossible,” David said. “They’d have no reason to be together. The yeerks won’t care that they’re married.”

“The yeerks have all their memories,” Jake said. “You’re our secret weapon. Try to find something, anything, that they’d know and that their yeerks might meet up for. We’ll set a trap around that.”

“Because traps always work out well for us,” Marco said, mock-serious. “We’re great with them.”

  



	12. Chapter 12

<This isn’t going to work,> Tobias said as we met up a short distance from the andalite campsite. <There aren’t enough of us. Both watching Ax and getting David’s parents are full-team jobs.>

<But they both need doing,> I pointed out. <He’s doing the best he can. Hopefully, we’ll get what we need from Ax really fast, and won’t have to wait long.>

<Yeah. Maybe. I need to hunt before the sun sets. Have a fun spy shift.> He took to the sky.

I watched him go. Tobias had never been social, but it was unusual for him to be this snippy, even about Jake. Was he still upset about perceived slights against Ax? Or had Jake done something else to worry him? It was going to have to wait – I had a job to do. I had to get eyes on Ax.

That was probably what it was, I decided as I dropped to the ground and demorphed to human. Tobias was upset because he was sure that Ax would leave us. Then he’d be alone, out in the forest. The only non-human on the team.

I caught that thought. Tobias was human. He was. He just spent most of his time in another shape.

But what was this situation like for him? David coming on board, being more like the rest of us than Tobias was, then Ax leaving? We’d have to spend more time together, after the current crisis – more off-mission time. Maybe Jake and I should double-date with Tobias and Rachel. Or I could check my calendar and see which Animorph had a birthday next, and the rest of us could go gift shopping for them. Movie night, even. Something to remind him that we were friends, not just teammates. Was there anyone he wasn’t getting along with at the moment? He and Marco teased each other, but it was good-natured. He was snippy at Jake, but he was just being critical of decisions he disagreed with. How did he and David get along? Probably not great. Have to deal with that.

Later. For the moment, fly.

Flies have surprisingly good night vision. Once I was morphed, I could see better in the fading light than I could as a human or an osprey. I’d made sure to memorize my physical orientation and distance to the andalite site before morphing (we’d all gotten lost too many times in small morphs not to), then headed over.

I flew low. Andalites don’t tend to look down, which always struck me as a design flaw for a species that eats through its feet. The ship wasn’t hard to find; from what I could make out with my fly vision, it was only concealed from the top. A door far larger than the average human door stood wide open. Andalites don’t like being confined, and the ship was far too small to have a dome. I’d only been scouting the ship for a few minutes when I realised that it was pointless; I just didn’t have the range of vision needed to see anything, and any attempt to explore properly was just going to get me lost.

Frustrating. I withdrew, and tried my wolf morph instead. This was more risky – everything I’d seen about andalite physiology suggested that they were prey animals, which meant there was a chance they’d be particularly good at spotting animals like wolves. But I was also pretty sure that they were adapted to large, open, grassy meadows, not forests. If I stayed in the trees, I should be fine.

As soon as I had wolf ears, I could hear them. Then, the wolf nose. I recognised the smell of andalites immediately – I’d smelled Ax and Alloran too often to miss it. The new andalites were distinguishable from Ax, but barely. My wolf nose was designed to smell minute differences in the chemicals excreted by mammals, and as much as andalites might superficially look like mammals, their chemistry was very, very alien.

  


Three andalites had entered the relatively open strip between the ship and the river. I crept closer, concealed by trees.

Ax and Estrid were facing each other, pacing back and forth. Gonrod watched them with his main eyes. The younger andalites raised their tails, and I realised what this was – tailfight training. I watched, interested – it had been a while since Ax had had the chance to fight another andalite. Visser Three was usually in morph when we fought. How would he do?

The two circled each other.

I could hear the other andalites approaching before I saw them. They weren’t looking for me; their focus was on the fight.

<I am betting on Aximili,> Aloth said, quietly but publically.

<You are a fool,> Arbat told him. <She will have him in two moves. But I accept the wager.>

To my inexperienced eye, Arbat looked to be right. Estrid walked with more balance and poise, her tail held high and ready. Ax’s own twitched a little, much more ready to react in general, but less specifically to a tail coming from the front.

Estrid whipped her smaller, more delicate blade straight forward over her shoulder, and the air seemed to hum over it. She almost clipped the side of Ax’s neck, but he stepped back just in time. While he was off-balance, she darted forward and hooked her tail around one of his back legs. Between his backward momentum and his attempt to block her, he fell heavily backwards, tail pinned underneath him. She brought the blade down for a final strike as he tried to roll out of the way.

Everything about the move, from the perfectly practiced execution to the smugness in her stance as she stepped away, said that she’d just pulled off a perfectly textbook version of some complicated, classic tailfighting move. Behind her, Gonrod dipped his stalk eyes approvingly, and Arbat beamed with pride. But his eyes narrowed as Ax rolled to his feet, unhurt.

I looked closer. Estrid hadn’t drawn blood with her strike, and both she and Ax were behaving as if the match wasn’t over. All she’d done was very neatly slice the tufts of blue fur from both of his front hocks. He stared at his own legs with one stalk eye while he narrowed his main ones at her. <You are toying with me.>

<You dodged my strike very quickly,> she replied, unconvincingly.

The pair circled, Ax’s main eyes on Estrid, all four of her eyes on him.

They traded blows, tailblade striking tailblade, both slowed by having to avoid seriously hurting each other. That seemed like a silly consideration to me; they could morph, and anything except an immediately fatal injury could be healed. Maybe it was a matter of politeness. Estrid was forcing Ax back again; he looked fatigued, which wasn’t a surprise. But more fatigued than he normally would be. I’d fought beside Ax a lot, and he had stamina when he needed it. Something had worn him out.

Estrid could sense it, too. She went to strike his left flank; he stumbled as he deflected the blade, fell, rolled to his feet. She, still fresh and strong, went for a winning strike.

And Ax, suddenly at full strength and speed, darted out of the way while one of her front hooves landed awkwardly on a stone that she hadn’t seen, keeping all four eyes on her opponent, and her other foot slipped on the muddy riverbank. Ax darted behind her while she struggled to keep her footing and forced his larger bulk against her flank, pushing her bodily into the water. As she fell, he sliced a long, shallow nick across her back.

<My strike,> he announced, stepping back.

Arbat stepped forward, and he and Ax helped Estrid out of the water.

<I would have won,> she mumbled as she struggled onto the bank.

<There is no ‘would have’,> Arbat said. <You didn’t win. You fought very well, though.>

<I had him with the victory-in-three-moves.>

<You would have had him, but instead you decided to show off and try to be fancy. There is no fancy or ugly victory; there is only victory and defeat. You could have had victory, and you chose defeat.>

<I didn’t choose defeat,> Estrid said petulantly, causing Gonrod to freeze in sheer horror at her un- _aristh_ -like disrespect. <If that rock hadn’t been there – >

<Then Aximili would not have lured you onto it,> Arbat said. <He was playing you the moment you made it clear that you intended to play him. A half-blind old retiree like me could see that he was feinting, and you would have seen that rock if you were paying attention to the battlefield instead of prancing about like a prizefighter. This is war, _aristh_ Estrid. There is victory and defeat. You grasp victory by any means necessary, whether that’s a fancy tailblade move or a rock on a muddy riverbank. You avoid defeat by not assuming that your opponent is weaker and stupider than you, or that the lay of the land will cater to your whims. >

Estrid bowed her tail and her head to Ax. <I underestimated you, Aximili. I apologise.>

Ax bowed back. <I underestimated you, too, Estrid,> he confessed. <I was not prepared to see such a high standard of tailwork.>

<And yet it would seem that my lack of field experience is a fatal flaw,> she said.

<I have field experience aplenty, but my lack of basic technique was a larger one.>

<Perhaps we will have time to learn from each other.>

<Perhaps.>

<Perhaps both of you _arisths_ should get to your posts before the sun is completely down, > Gonrod barked. <We have three days to plan the most daring assassination in this war, and as yet, no way to get into the Yeerk Pool without raising an alarm!>

The pair trooped into the ship. As they passed Aloth, he quipped, <And Aximili, you might want to morph in that time, unless you want to face down the Abonimation with Estrid’s trimming work on your hocks.>

It was hard to tell in the fading light, but I was pretty sure that Ax was blushing.


	13. Chapter 13

“Three days?” Marco said. “How are we supposed to come up with a good plan in three days?” He checked that the bus stop seat wasn’t wet, then plonked himself down.

“Oh ye of little faith,” David said, crossing his arms and shaking his head. He was leaning against a phone booth. “We have a plan already. Not only that, it’s one with almost no chance of anyone getting killed.”

<A safe plan?> Tobias asked. <That doesn’t sound very Animorph-like.>

“He’s exaggerating,” Jake said. “It’s actually horribly dangerous. We’re going to walk right into a yeerk ambush.”

“Just like every mission, then,” Marco said.

“No, this time we get to make the ambush ourselves,” Rachel said, sounding far more happy about it than she probably should.

<So I’m guessing that’s why we’re out here at an isolated bus stop past everyone’s curfew?> Tobias asked. <To get ourselves ambushed?>

“If it goes well, nobody will get ambushed,” David said. “I can be convincing enough.”

“Is somebody actually going to explain the plan, or…?” Marco asked.

“Just watch and learn,” David said smugly. He sauntered into the phone booth. Jake and Marco exchanged a little eyeroll. Rachel shot me an excited grin.

A few seconds later, he was on the phone. “It’s David. Hi, Mom. Or should I say, yeerk. What do I want? A couple of packets of plain crisps, actually. The more important thing here is what you want.” He listened for several seconds. “No, look, I don’t have time for head games. I can’t give the andalites the slip for very long. Here’s the deal; I want my parents back, and you want this blue cube thing. We’re going to trade. No, no – Visser Three stays out of this. That guy is madder than a mercury-soaked fascinator and I don’t trust him. Don’t think about what that cube can do in the Visser’s hands; think about what it can do in your hands. It’s pretty fucking obvious that Visser Can’t-Manage-For-Shit only holds his rank because of his fancy host – okay, okay, so he’s a war hero too, whatever, I don’t care. That’s not important. The important thing is that it’s to both our benefits to keep this between us until our trade is done. Both my parents for the cube. Yes, I can, but only while the andalites are busy. It’s going to be a tight timeline. I can’t risk calling Dad, that’s your problem. Okay, look. I’m coming alone, obviously, and I expect the same from you – no more than four people on your side. You two in whatever hosts you’ve moved into, and my parents. Yes, you can bring Dad’s yeerk; there’s no way he’ll trust you alone with the cube, is there? Okay. No, I just told you, the timeline isn’t flexible. The instant the andalites suspect something, this is all over. Day after tomorrow. No, not somewhere public – do you think I’m an idiot? A large crowd isn’t safety, it’s a yeerk ambush! We’ll do it at the train station. Because my family is walking straight onto a train out of here afterwards, that’s why! Day after tomorrow, nine in the morning, train station. Oh, don’t worry. We won’t be interrupted.” He hung up.

“Aaaand it’s done,” he said, exiting the phone booth. “This is easy. I don’t know why you didn’t rescue Tom months ago, Jake.”

“Tom’s situation is a little more complicated,” Jake snapped.

“Sure it is.”

<So,> Tobias cut in, <I’m guessing we grab your parents at the exchange and go?>

“We’ll need to somehow make a fake cube or something,” I said thoughtfully. “This will go a lot smoother if we can actually make the exchange.”

“They’ll want to test it during the trade,” Jake said. “We’ll need to be prepared for that. But if we’re right about how yeerks think, they won’t expect any of us. They wouldn’t expect the andalite bandits to put themselves at risk reuniting this human family.”

“How do we know one of Visser Three’s toadies weren’t listening to that entire conversation?” Marco asked.

“If they were, the yeerk in my mom doesn’t know about it,” David said. “We exchanged code phrases before I mentioned the deal.”

“Why does your family have code phrases?” I asked.

“So we have, like, a day to set up a way to safely extract these two from the train station.” Rachel inspected a nail thoughtfully. “We could just put them on the train and have them get off at a random stop, then find them later. But there might be yeerks on the train, too.”

“So we send an escort with them,” Marco shrugged.

“Why don’t we just bring the morphing cube with us and not hand it over?” David asked. “If we give my parents the morphing power then and there, then – ”

“No,” everyone said in unison.

“Too risky,” Marco said. “There’s a chance the yeerks will ambush us. There’s no way we can let them have the _escafil_ device if they do.”

“They won’t ambush us,” David said, exasperated. “My parents are worthless to them compared to the morphing cube. They’ll want all of this to go smoothly.”

“If they trust you to actually make the trade alone and in good faith.”

“Of course they would! My explanation was perfect. They think I’m rebelling against the andalites and running off with my family, just a poor innocent human boy caught up in all this.”

“They might not think you’re as good an actor as you think you are,” Marco said. “We can’t take ridiculous risks like that.”

“Look, just because you’ve totally failed to save your mom doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make every effort to – ”

“We’re going to need a fake cube for this to work, either way,” I cut in before a full-blown argument could develop. “How are we going to make it?”

<I know how to do it,> Tobias said. <Is anyone handy with tools?>

“Jake once hung a front door,” Marco said.

Jake rolled his eyes. “That’s me, master of the hand drill and setsquare. Okay, Tobias and I will make a fake cube. Rachel and Ax… um, Rachel and David, you handle the train station. We’re not looking for a dramatic fight here; we want to get David’s parents out and somewhere the yeerks can’t track them, that’s it.”

“What about Marco and me?” I asked.

“Go home and spend some time with your families before somebody starts filing missing persons reports. We’ve all been spending way too much time away from home. Maybe try to catch up on some homework.”

“The glamorous life of a superhero,” Marco said, rolling his eyes.

<Actually this is pretty in line with superhero stuff,> Tobias commented. <Spider-Man has to hang out with his Aunt and keep his grades up and stuff.>

“And get a hot girlfriend,” Marco said, fluttering his eyelashes at Rachel.

“I’d rather date the Goblin,” Rachel replied flatly.

“Aww, you read a comic! I’m so proud of you.”

“Of course I didn’t. I watched the cartoon. It’s Jordan’s favourite.” Then she walked off with David, to plan the Great Parent Extraction.

And I went home, to relax and spend time with my family and for once do nothing Animorphs-related.


	14. Chapter 14

<So why are we spying on Ax?> Marco asked for the fifth time, settling into a corner where a computer console met the wall. I tried to ignore how delicious his little fly body looked to my lizard brain. Eating teammates was poor form.

<We’re not spying on Ax. Ax isn’t here right now. He’s out demonstrating how to blend in with humanity to the andalites.>

<My mistake. Let me rephrase. Why are we searching the ship of our so-called allies without their knowledge or permission when spying on Ax right now promises to be way, way funnier?>

<I just… want to be sure that everything’s in order.>

<Ah. You’re suspicious of these random andalites.>

<No!>

<Why not?>

<What?>

Marco took off to do a loop of the room. Searching as insects and lizards wasn’t particularly fast or efficient, but we didn’t know what sort of security measures the andalites had in place and we didn’t want to be caught on camera. I wasn’t worried about being caught as a lizard; the andalites tended to leave their hatch open, and I’d already run into two cockroaches and a very lost shrew.

<I mean,> Marco said, <this whole thing is suspicious as hell, right? We don’t hear from the andalites for ages, and suddenly they send a team of assassins down? Why? Visser Three’s always here, on Earth. How much of a problem can he possibly be causing if Earth is so far down their priority list?>

<I think it’s an honor thing,> I said. <The intelligence officer is Alloran’s brother, and he looks like the capable, powerful guy on the team. He probably pushed for this.>

<Then why did he bring the girl along?>

<What?>

Marco mentally sighed. <So the andalites, kings of No Girl Cooties In Our Manly Warrior Armies, are finally recruiting women, and this is a really big deal and means things are looking super bad for the war effort. Right? According to Ax, anyway.>

<Yeah.>

<So Arbat puts together this haphazard team of people who seem to hate each other in order to go mercy kill his brother or whatever, and brings an _aristh_ along? What’s the point in that? She obviously has no idea about basic military protocol, even I could see that. She’s obviously untrained, so what does she add to this assassination plan? Isn’t she way more valuable being trained for military work with other _arisths_? >

<If you’re this suspicious of them, why didn’t you bring anything up before now?> I asked.

<Ax is a big boy. He can be paranoid and confused without my help. That doesn’t answer my question, though – why are we here?>

<You’ll think it’s stupid.>

<I think a lot of things are stupid.>

<Right. It’s… occurred to me that this war will someday be over.>

<I sure hope so.>

<And when it is, if we’re not all yeerk slaves, this whole ‘aliens are real’ thing is going to become public knowledge. I don’t know how it’s going to end but I don’t think it’s going to end quietly, and even if it did, you’d never keep all the freed hosts quiet about it.>

<Why would we want to?>

<Well, I just want introducing humanity to the universe at large to go… smoothly. I mean, humans don’t have a great track record even for just meeting other humans. Our introduction to the galactic stage is going to be through war. We’re a species of xenophobic jerks and the andalites are a species of xenophobic jerks and, well, the more we know about each other right from the beginning, the less bumps we’re going to hit, diplomatically.>

<You just want to learn more about andalites.>

<Yes. Ax is just one kid. Anything he tells me is going to be limited and biased, same as if an alien based all their knowledge of humanity on one of us.>

<So instead you’ve decided to wander around an andalite ship as a lizard, without context for anything you see?>

<I admit it’s not a great plan.>

<Well, so far it’s taught us that andalites use computers, which we already knew. Of course, we can’t actually turn these computers on to poke around in them.>

<Okay, so I didn’t think things – >

<We know the layout of the ship, though, Cassie. I bet that’ll tell us tons about andalites. It’s pretty obvious that this ship is a lot more primitive than the Ascalin, which we’ve already been on, and is tiny enough that I bet these andalites all wanted to murder each other on the trip over.>

<I also want to murder them, and I’ve only spent a few hours with them,> I pointed out.

<It’s a true testament to andalite military discipline that they all got here alive,> Marco agreed.

<There’s a lot of cool-looking tech in the engines and shields and stuff,> I said.

<There is! Did you understand any of it?>

<… No. But there’s that big locked room between the engines that we can’t get inside!>

<Oh, yeah. I bet I know what’s in there. It’s super exciting.>

<What do you think is in there?>

<Water and air. And grass, or whatever andalites eat when they’re in space and don’t have a Dome ship.>

<Oh,> I said, feeling stupid. Of course they would have a locked supply room.

We heard the soft thud of andalite hooves approaching. I pressed my lizard body into a corner; Marco flew out of sight.

Two andalites entered the ship.

<I’m just saying, Commander, the _arisths_ are children. There is no reason to mix them up in a dangerous assassination. I’ll head in, make the kill, and leave. > Aloth spoke publically, as usual, but quietly.

<And I am saying that we already have a plan. Arbat’s skill in strategy is unmatched, and you will follow his plan.>

<It’s not fair to send him against his brother like this, Commander.>

<And how would a coward such as yourself presume to tell me what is fair? You would have me deny him his honorable vengeance and call it fair?>

<I’m just saying – >

<I understand completely what you are saying, Aloth!> Gonrod’s tone grew venomous. <You are saying, under the guise of pity and compassion for two young _arisths_ and the only soldier who is actually here by choice, that you want me to send you off on your merry way without any oversight to allegedly complete this mission alone, yes? I am not a fool, coward. I know very well that you will put your own skin above the People, above your duty, above your honor. Do you think I did not hear you interrogating Aximili about life on earth? You plan to run away and wait out the war in disgrace! >

<A baseless accusation,> Aloth said, without much energy.

<One based on your known history and behaviour. Do you deny it?>

<You know as well as I do that this is an impossible mission, Gonrod.>

<The mere fact that you would say such a thing shows that you put your own weakness above your duty.>

<If Arbat the so-called genius strategist thought this had a chance of working, Command would not have conscripted us,> Aloth said. <They would have sent a real assassination unit.>

<And here I was told that you are a renowned excellent shot, or are your skills not as advertised?>

<You know very well that I am one of the best marksmen alive. But you also know, Commander, that that is not why either of us were sent here. What do you expect to happen, even with the slim possibility that we survive? Do you believe that they will really wipe both of our records clean and welcome you back into the military proper? That little violator of Seerow’s Kindness has the right idea, hiding out from their wrath out here. If you were clever, you would consider joining him.>

<You speak nonsense, cowardice, and treason, all at once. I think that’s a new low for you.>

<Gonrod, please, listen to reason. You have a responsibility to yourself and to your crew. None of us have a future with this plan.>

<My responsibility is to this crew within the parameters of our mission. It is not free reign to desert the People! And just because you are a low criminal, Aloth – >

<And you.>

<Does not mean – >

<And Aximili.>

<That our duty to the People is – >

<And Estrid.>

<What did Estrid do?>

<I don’t know. But one of the first female _arisths_ sent on a highly dangerous backwater mission like this almost immediately after recruitment, with no military record? Does that not sound suspicious to you? Somebody’s trying to get rid of her. And Arbat’s status and skill is the only thing that kept him on the homeworld after the colossal family embarrassment of his brother’s capture. They’re trying to get rid of us, don’t you see that? None of us are supposed to survive this. >

<If that were the case, Aloth, Arbat would not have put this mission together. He is not suicidal.>

<He has to be, or he wouldn’t have come out here! They know we can’t succeed, Gonrod! This mission isn’t about killing Visser Three, it’s about getting rid of us. I’m not saying you should betray the People, because what Command wants is the same thing I’m suggesting – for us to disappear. I’m just saying, we don’t have to die for that to happen. We have everything we need for a future here, don’t you see?>

<What are you blathering about?>

<I don’t understand how I can make this clearer to you. Aximili knows how to survive on this planet. Arbat has the skills to head an excellent _shomaktil_. There is grass and trees here, even if the sunlight is a little dim, and so much unclaimed space! And Estrid is an absolutely terrible _aristh_ , but you must have noticed that in a couple of years she could shape up into a truly exceptional _takluthan_ , if she gets the chance to live that long, which she won’t if you push us into following this stupid – >

<Enough.> Gonrod’s voice was quiet, and cold, and carried a strong undercurrent of danger. <You speak of treason upon treason, Aloth, and I am deeply offended not only to be your Commander, but because you insult me by thinking me the sort of person you feel able to express such things to. Let me make this very clear – I have not yet executed you, because I am a little short on marksmen for this mission. But this stops right here and now. One more hint of treachery – one word of fleeing, one more interrogation of Aximili about survival here, one objection to the orders of Command or to Arbat’s strategy – and I will declare you traitor, execute you here and now and present my actions to Command upon the completion of our mission, and let me tell you I don’t think they’re going to rule me out of order after I explain this nonsense to them. I will explain this in a way a coward can understand – the biggest threat to your life is not Visser Three or the High Command. The biggest threat to your life, here and now, is any hesitation on your part to complete your mission, and the only way you are ever going to be safe again in your entire life is to put a Shredder beam through that embarrassment’s head and kill the abomination inside. Have I made myself perfectly clear?>

<… Yes, Commander Gonrod.>

<And are you going to entertain these childish fantasies of running away any longer?>

<No, Commander.>

<Even in the privacy of your own skull?>

<No, Commander.>

<Good. Then get to your post. There is work to be done.>

The andalites kept walking. I remained where I was until they’d moved into another room. Then Marco and I got the hell out of there.

<Well,> Marco said. <I guess I owe you an apology, Cassie. We really did learn a lot about andalites!>

<I suppose so,> I said.

<It sounds like a suicide mission by criminals and other people the Andalite High Command wants to get rid of.>

<It sure does.>

<And we gave them Ax.>

<Yeah that might have been a misstep.>

<Ax is smart. He can take care of himself.>

I remembered Ax fighting Estrid. How they related to each other, how he seemed to be blushing. I hoped he’d be thinking with that smart brain. <We should probably, y’know, tell him,> I said. <I mean, we should, right? Andalite politics isn’t our business, but if this really is a suicide mission...>

<Do you think it is? Or do you think Aloth was being paranoid? I mean, pretty much all of our missions look like suicide missions to me, and we’re not dead yet. Maybe Gonrod’s right about him being a coward.>

Now I just felt like I needed to know about andalites even more. <Thanks for coming out to watch my back,> I told Marco. <I need to go and think for a bit.>

<You do that. I’m going to talk to Ax.>

We found an isolated spot to morph ospreys. Marco took to the air and started circling the area, waiting for Ax’s return. I turned toward the mountains.

I didn’t have any other andalites around to talk to, but I had some other alien friends.


	15. Chapter 15

Tobias was in the hork-bajir valley when I arrived. At least, I assumed it was Tobias, unless Ket Halpak had an identical twin. Ket and Tobias were partway up the cliff that marked one of the valley’s steep sides, angling a large satellite dish that had been tied between two trees.

<Um,> I said, <what are you doing?>

<Trying to get good TV reception,> Tobias answered, not seeming surprised to hear me.

<I hope you know that that just raises a lot more questions,> I said.

Tobias gave the mental equivalent of an impatient sigh, then said, <Toby’s getting to the age where she’s learning a lot of communication skills, but David’s taught her all this outdated slang. If she’s going to learn English, it should at least be usable English.>

“Tobias bring screen to talk to Toby,” Ket explained. “A young hork-bajir needs to hear the voices and stories and… _ghethren_...”

<Personalities,> Tobias supplied.

“Person… alti… of whole clan, to make the person that she will be. If only hear mother and father, she learns to be mother and father. That is no good! Mother and father are already here!”

<The clan here isn’t big enough to provide enough… role models, I guess… for Toby, or for Tenn’s _kawatnoj_ , when it’s born. Feeding them a bunch of TV cliches isn’t ideal, but it’s the best we can do right now.>

“Radio is better, most of the time,” Ket agreed. “But sometimes, seeing is good, for… for showing connection, seeing and hearing.”

<For showing context.>

“Context.”

<So you… stole a TV and a sattelite dish?> I asked.

<These were ethically liberated, actually,> Tobias said. <It was getting electricity that was the hard part.>

<Are you just constantly off having these side adventures without the rest of us?>

<Not _constantly_. >

<I’m jealous.>

<Your jealousy will comfort me next time you’re off making friends with yeerk traitors or having adventures in Australia.>

<Touché.> I landed further down the cliff, on a spot that I knew I could stand comfortably as a human, and demorphed.

“Friend Cassie!” Jara stuck his head out of a cave. I headed over to greet him, touching my forehead to his.

“Hi, Jara,” I said. I looked around the cave. It was empty, except for a television (displaying snow), a radio, and some power cords snaking off into the depths; hork-bajir don’t go much for shelter in the way that humans do but I supposed you couldn’t set up a TV in a tree when it might rain. “Where’s Toby?” I asked.

“With Tenn and Brin?”

“Brin? Another one?”

“Is good. Hork-bajir clans cannot be so small.” He screwed up his face. “Even now is… many clans for new clan. Jara, Ket, Tenn, Brin, have _anatoj_ are different clans. From different clans. Is not… all safe, but is gooder than being alone.”

“Better than being alone.” I nodded. I’d wondered, back when we’d helped Jara and Ket escape, just how Ellimist was planning to start a free hork-bajir colony with only two hork-bajir. Apparently he’d created a way for any other hork-bajir who freed themselves to find them.

“You come for fun, or for help?”

“I need… advice.”

Jara laughed. “Humans not often ask hork-bajir for advice!” Behind him, the TV screen cleared to show some kind of soap opera. Jara stuck his head out of the cave and bellowed, “It work!” Then he turned back to me. “What you want to know?”

“How much do you know about andalites?”

“Some. Jara’s _anatoj_ was andalite.”

“Anatoj?”

“Like Jara is to Toby, again.”

“Your father?”

“Yes, father of Jara’s father. She was Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan, one of first andalites on hork-bajir homeworld. She was _kawatnoj_ to… watching andalites.”

I tried to puzzle this out. “Your grandmother was the daughter of some andalite research scientists who were studying your planet. Your ancestors’ planet, I mean. And she… what, fell in love with a hork-bajir?” I tried not to let the concept gross me out.

“Aldrea had morphing,” he said, nodding. “It was new, not many had it. Then yeerks came. Aldrea helped fight yeerks. She love hork-bajir rebel leader; then, she stay hork-bajir too long. Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan _kalashikh_ Dak Hamee, they _kawatnikh_ … they make new hork-bajir, Seerow Hamee. Seerow Hamee _kalashikh_ Den Majhar, they _kawatnikh_ Lok Hamar, Jara Hamee.” He said this with the measured pace of rote learning. “This my _Hamit_.”

“But you don’t like andalites, even though they helped your people? Like Aldrea?”

Jara considered this. “Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthil are _fellana_ ,” he said after a little while. “Other andalites are not.”

“So on the hork-bajir homeworld – does the hork-bajir homeworld have a name?”

“Hork-bajir not know planets, until andalites and yeerks,” Jara said. “Hork-bajir live on _Rhatag_ , Father Earth. Andalites and yeerks from _Ontu_ , Mother Sky.”

“Were many andalites on Rhatag? Like, was it a major military base, or is it like Earth now, where the andalites are spread too thin?”

“Not many andalites in Jara’s clan stories,” Jara said. “But, Jara’s clan only on small part. Maybe andalites visit other pieces of Rhatag? Jara have only Aldrea’s… past… song. Aldrea see yeerks; with Dak, try stop yeerks.” He shrugged, which was a weird thing to see a hork-bajir do. “Ontu steal Rhatag _kawatnikh_ , now we here. Everything else, you know.”

I nodded again, trying not to feel disappointed. I knew I couldn’t expect Jara to know anything about andalites – him being related to one was more than I’d expected. How, exactly, did I expect him to help me with this? ‘I think the andalites have written off our planet and seem to be sending war criminals on suicide missions in last-ditch desperation, any advice?’

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m sorry Aldrea and Dak and the other rebels couldn’t beat the yeerks. And I’m sorry the andalites couldn’t save you, either.”

Jara snorted. “Andalites save eight hork-bajir for every ten.”

“What?”

“You not know?” Jara glanced outside, at Tobias, then turned his attention back to me. “Bad thing, hork-bajir with yeerks. Yeerks want blades like andalites, so they get many blades.” He twisted his wrist for emphasis. “Andalites not want this! They try to stop yeerks from having any hork-bajir. They win more than lose. Yeerks could have had so many hork-bajir! Now, they have not many. Eight for every ten kept from yeerks.”

“Are you saying eighty per cent of hork-bajir are actually fr – oh.” My stomach sank. “You mean the andalites killed them.”

“Free or Dead should be a choice,” Jara said fiercely. “Otherwise there is no free! They kill before hork-bajir have a chance. Is hork-bajir chance, hork-bajir choice. Not andalite choice.”

I swallowed around the lump in my throat, trying not to think about all the hork-bajir slaves I’d killed. All of those people who had just… been in the way. Often I’d had to do it; often, it was them or me, and I was protecting my planet. But how many of those people had been put in danger in the first place because we’d mounted an ultimately pointless mission, or we’d messed up, or we’d looked for a more expedient route? I remembered Aftran’s brother leaping for me, me knocking him down, raising my blade against that poor slave because the slug in his head had _irritated_ me…

I still didn’t think Jara’s hatred of the andalites was fair. But I could see where it had come from. It was his history, his life, after all.

“This is what Jara know about andalites,” Jara continued. “To andalite, yeerk is enemy. To andalite, hork-bajir is yeerk weapon. Understand? Hork-bajir with yeerk, very dangerous. Hork-bajir without yeerk, does not matter. Be ready for when andalites come, friend Cassie; they may help, but it is because they will see human as weapon.”

I thanked Jara for his advice and left. The conversation had explained a lot about Jara and Ket’s attitude towards andalites, but wasn’t really helpful for my situation. My main worry wasn’t whether the andalites who came to save us did so out of altruism or out of a desire to weaken their enemy.

My main worry was that they wouldn’t show up to save us at all.


	16. Chapter 16

Things were tense at the train station. A second phone call had straightened out the details of the trade. David sat on a bench at the nearly-deserted train station, a plastic shopping bag on his lap. The object inside, hidden under a couple of towels, was cube-shaped. I could see the train tickets sticking out of his pockets.

I was a rat. So was Rachel. The two of us were under a nearby bench, monitoring the situation, although I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do if it went wrong. I supposed that would be up to Tobias and Marco, currently pigeons (a red-tailed hawk had been seen on far too many missions for Tobias to risk his own body), or Jake, waiting in the train.

Four people walked onto the platform. I recognised David’s parents; his father from that time we’d abducted him, and his mother from her job at the Gardens. I tended to avoid her, but she’d struck up a friendship with Mom. The other two, who were rather large men holding onto David’s parents’ arms as nonchalantly as possible, jumped at small movements. They were probably expecting an ambush.

David’s parents broke into relieved smiles as soon as they saw him. So did David. But then his gaze locked on Tobias, and the color left his face. (Wow, he was a good actor.) He snatched up the bag and headed for the train, shoving past the conductor.

The controllers exchanged glances – this wasn’t how this part was supposed to go. The exchange was supposed to happen on the platform. After some hurried conversation, they sent his mother onto the train, keeping a tight, threatening grip on his father. She rushed on, her face worried.

Whatever happened inside, she rushed off a moment later, pulling David by the wrist.

“It might be an andalite!” he was protesting, his voice low but urgent. “Mom, they’ll kill us if – ”

“Then we hurry it up!” she said, dropping the shopping bag on the bench. The towels slid, revealing the edge of the pale blue cube. It looked just like it had on that day with Elfangor – just like David’s careful photographs that had caught the yeerks’ attention. She looked at the controllers, still holding her husband’s arm and staring. They were waiting for something.

They were waiting for confirmation that the morphing cube was genuine. This had been part of the agreement. She let David press one of her hands to the cube for a moment; then he fished a jar out of the bag and dropped a green anole into her palm. With a few whispered instructions, she concentrated, dropped the lizard onto the ground, and began to change, one hand shrinking and becoming green and scaly. She held the hand in front of her as it changed, concealing it from the conductor and any passers-by. Then she stopped, and reversed the change.

One of the Controllers nodded. David and his mother headed back toward the train, leaving the bag behind. David got on; his mother paused at the door and waited. David’s father was released and rushed over, pausing only to hug his wife briefly, tightly, before heading in to greet his son.

This was working! In less than a minute, that train would take off, taking David and his parents far away from any yeerks. One of the Controllers was lifting the cube out of the bag, inspecting it, hefting its weight and running his fingers over the corners. He didn’t look like he’d found anything wrong with it. He shouldn’t; Jake had had the original to compare it to, and the workshop that Tobias had known how to sneak into had been very well equipped.

In about thirty seconds, the train doors would close. They had to be fooled for thirty more seconds.

Then the spaceship swooped overhead.

It was the andalite assassination team’s ship; small, worn, and completely unconcealed. David’s mom’s head jerked back. She stared.

<Fuck,> she thought-spoke in Jake’s voice. <Marco, Rachel, stay with the train and make certain David’s safe. Tobias, Cassie, with me; I might need translators.>

The controllers, as fearful of being found by andalites as David had pretended to be, grabbed the fake escafil device and bolted. I dashed for the bathroom to change morphs. Jake was dashing onto the train to do the same thing; I’d lost track of everyone else.

The andalite ship was still rising; it shielded itself from sight once it got high enough to do so. We knew where it was going, though; the ship had been travelling in the general direction of the forest. I morphed osprey – the fastest morph I had – and headed towards their camp.


	17. Chapter 17

It takes a lot of time to land a spaceship in a forest without making a scene. The andalites had barely gotten themselves sorted when the three of us arrived. Tobias and I landed in the trees while Arbat exited the ship, followed a few seconds later by Gonrod. Both of them looked fairly on edge. When Ax and Estrid followed, they did so meekly and reluctantly, as if trying to be invisible.

Jake had landed a little distance away to demorph. He was still fuming when he stormed over to the river, fully human, and up to Gonrod. “What the hell was that about?! You yahoos were flying an uncloaked spaceship over a human population center! In full view of humans! You can’t do things like that!”

<This doesn’t concern you, human. Go home before I take offense at your impertinence.>

“Since you’re playing your stupid hero games on my planet, endangering my species, I’d say it damn well does concern me! We’ve tried to be reasonable about this, Commander. We’re allies, so we stood aside for you to complete your utterly pointless mission. But you have to understand that humanity as a whole has no idea that this war is happening, and it has to stay that way. If people realise they’re at war, they’re going to fight back with weapons, and the yeerks outmatch us in that capacity. Millions of humans will die.”

Gonrod eyed him with contempt. <You want to deprive your own people of their right to fight for their honor? And you dare to stand before me and announce such, as if – >

“I don’t give a shit about your misguided and egotistical honor,” Jake said, rubbing his temples. “Is your entire species this insufferable or do I just have the worst luck? I don’t know if you can see this from way up there on your high fucking horse, but we are fighting for the freedom and survival of our species and planet. You can stand there, and talk about honor and pride and protocol or whatever, because your species has the luxury of treating this war like a game.”

All four of Gonrod’s eyes widened. He even lifted his tail marginally. <How dare you?! You insinuate that we treat our sacred duty as a GAME, you dishonorable little – >

“I didn’t insinuate, I downright declared it,” Jake spat. “And I know I was right, because the very first thing you did was call me dishonorable. It’s a game because you have the luxury of being insulted by such claims, and acting like your little rules are important enough for the rest of us to dance around. The absolute most you guys put on the line here is your lives. Do you have any idea what an absurdly low stake that is? Is this just a career for you, just something to earn a paycheck and be a hero and look cool to all the andalite babes? You’re not a proud race of warriors, you’re a species of fucking tourists play-acting galactic combat on everyone else’s planets and getting the natives killed. _This isn’t your battlefield. It’s our home._ Play nice, or don’t play at all.”

Gonrod had gone very still, as had both _arisths_ behind him. (Arbat appeared to be paying no attention to the conversation whatsoever.) Gonrod glared at Jake as if he could fire shredders from his eyes.  <Is you entire species this ungrateful?> he asked.

“Ungrateful?” Jake cocked his head. “Name one thing any andalite except Aximili has done to help humanity.”

<You, fool human child, have no concept of the space battles fought, the andalite lives lost, to stem the tide of yeerks flocking to this planet. We are here, putting our own lives on the line, in the name of your protection! Warrior Aloth-Attamil-Gahar died in combat tonight attempting to kill the leader of the invasion of your planet!>

Jake’s gaze softened. “I wasn’t aware of that. I’m sorry for your loss.”

<He died with honor. But you understand the sacrifices that my people have made for yours.>

“No, actually, I don’t. I can’t comment on space battles; my people don’t excel at space travel. But Aloth’s death, though regrettable, didn’t have a damn thing to do with protecting our planet. What do you think is going to happen if you kill the yeerk leader? They’re going to pack up and go home? People talk about Visser Three’s amazing space battle strategy skills or whatever, but down here, on Earth, he’s a bigger danger to yeerk conquest than your team and mine put together. Most of his people with any brains hate him, he executes people for the slightest mistakes so nobody ever learns anything or is brave enough to take risks. He executes people for contradicting him, so if he draws the wrong conclusion he sticks with it until it blows up in his face. He makes enemies of anyone who would actually be competent at his job instead of taking their advice, and he goes for big, flashy ploys instead of steady, reliable ones. I’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve survived encounters with him because he stopped to boast, or because he wanted to look cool and impressive while he killed us, or because one of his underlings thought it was better to let us go and pretend they’d never seen us than to risk his wrath. You’re not here to kill him because it’ll hurt the yeerks, and you’re definitely not here to kill him because it’ll help us. You’re here to kill him because you’re offended that a yeerk would dare infest an andalite. That’s just for us pathetic lesser races, isn’t it? Humans and hork-bajir and whatever. If it happens to one of you, oh, _then_ it’s a true disaster and that yeerk is an abomination. Never mind his millions of cousins infesting other races.” Jake glanced at Arbat. “Nobody can be bothered to send actual assistance to Earth, but sure, it’s no problem sparing a spaceship and a crew on a pointless honor mission to destroy a reminder that andalites aren’t untouchable. Those lesser races with real stake in the war, facing real danger, might have to quietly sit across the table from their infested brothers every day at breakfast, but if an andalite’s brother is infested then it’s time to pull out all the stops, trample across a planet we don’t understand, put the locals in extreme danger and jeopardise their war effort, and expect them to be grateful we put our hooves on their ground at all. Is that how it goes?”

Ax, I noticed, avoided looking at Jake or Gonrod. Arbat and Estrid watched the conversation openly. Gonrod looked at Arbat.

<He is insulting your honor and your mission!> he pointed out. <Are you going to take that?>

<You are my Commander,> Arbat replied amiably. <I would not dream of doing you the dishonor of fighting your battle for you, even if I must bear insults to my honor. I trust you to defend it.>

Gonrod narrowed all four of his eyes. <Did you not hear what he said about your brother?>

<Is he wrong?>

Judging by the body language of the _arisths_ , they both thought so, although neither of them spoke up. Gonrod turned his attention back to Jake. <I understand that you cannot be expected to comprehend the complexities of this war,> he said, keeping his mental voice calm. <I have no wish to fight with you. Earth is one of many planets our military is trying to defend. Resources are thin, and the fight is becoming somewhat desperate,> he said, glancing at Estrid. <Understand, human, that while you stand there and rant about how we aren’t being careful enough with your precious planet, we are trying to protect multiple other planets at the same time. Has it occurred to you that the Abomination you sneer at for his management skills has a reputation as a space strategist for a reason, and that his skill in space battle is a significant factor in the number of yeerks on your planet and the resources available to them? Or that, whether you succeed or fail to defend this planet, he will be using those skills against other planets once he is no longer needed here, destroying the militaries of any species who oppose the yeerks and turning this section of the galaxy into a yeerk free-for-all? Did it occur to you that this, here, while he is on the ground and distracted by this employment, is our best chance at eliminating him before he takes to space again and becomes the yeerks’ greatest weapon? We have limited time and resources to take advantage of a very rare opportunity, and we just lost our assassin, so – >

<You killed him!> Estrid burst out, and all the other andalites in the clearing swung their heads to glare at her. She blushed, deep blue coloring her ears, but persisted. <We all saw it! Why is everyone pretending it didn’t happen?! You shot Aloth during our escape!>

<He would never have made it to the ship in time,> Gonrod said.

<So you decided to make that decision for him?! What kind of leader shoots their own people from behind?!>

<Commander Gonrod acted correctly,> Arbat said, his voice gentle. <Had I a clear shot, I would have done the same thing. Aloth’s fate was sealed the moment if became obvious that he could not make it to the ship. Had we left him to the yeerks, there would be two Abominations on this planet, and one of them would know all of the military secrets pertinent to this mission. Would you wish that on Aloth, Estrid?>

She looked away.

<The yeerks would know our location, our mission, every password and bit of military knowledge that Aloth had. And he would be powerless to prevent them from taking whatever they wanted and using his body however they wanted. Would you wish that on anyone?>

Jake kept his face carefully blank. I’d relayed to him what Marco and I had overheard, so I knew he was thinking the same thing I was – _Gonrod threatened to kill Aloth yesterday, and today, this happens?_

I glanced at Ax, but his demeanor gave nothing away, at least not to my eyes.

<Today’s attempt was at Aloth’s insistence,> Gonrod said. <Tomorrow, we infiltrate the Yeerk Pool, and there will be no need for any such conspicuous nonsense. After this moment, there is no need for you to ever see any of us again.>

Jake looked at Ax. But Ax was looking away, all four eyes finding something more interesting to fix on.

“Right,” Jake said. “Best of luck with your mission, and your war.”

<Best of luck with yours.>

And with that, we left.


	18. Chapter 18

The next morning, we met in the barn. Apart from myself, of course, Tobias was the first to arrive. We avoided talking about how Ax wasn’t there until Jake showed up, looking harried and weary. I gave him a supportive smile, which he returned weakly. Not long now, and things could go back to normal. Except… possibly without Visser Three. And without Ax. I tried not to let my heart sink.

But I didn’t have much time to dwell, because David arrived soon after, a huge eagle swooping into the barn without regard for secrecy or the animals inside it. He landed rather heavily and started demorphing.

Rachel and Marco followed him in. <Mission failed,> Marco said grimly. <The parents were both still controllers, and they’d set up an ambush two stations out of town. They expected the cube to be fake; they just wanted any military secrets that might be in David’s head. Nobody’s dead, but the yeerks still have both of them.>

“What happened?” Jake asked.

<What happened?!> David cried. <You abandoned us out there! With the whole team, we could have got them out! You ran off and let the yeerks have them!> He launched himself forward, a tangle of human and eagle parts, and snapped his beak at Jake. Jake didn’t flinch; he merely lifted one arm to defend himself, the predator’s beak sinking into his flesh and pulling away a long strip of it. His blood flowed freely to the floor; he waited, face impassive, for David to back away, then healed the wound.

“Guys, this is an animal hospital!” I snapped. “You can’t bleed all over the place in here!” I started collecting cleaning supplies. The boys, of course, ignored me.

<I knew you’d pull something like this, but I can’t believe you’d do it so _openly_ ,> David said, still demorphing. <And you guys are all going along with this? Seriously?>

“David, what are you talking abo – ”

<What am I talking about?! Are you seriously going to keep playing inno – > David went silent as he lost thought-speak. Soon, he was human enough to continue. “You gave my parents to the yeerks! That’s what this whole little charade was, wasn’t it? You wanted to make it so you would never have to save them, so you could keep me around for your stupid war, so you staged this ‘rescue attempt’ so the yeerks would be on guard and freeing them would be impossible!”

We all stared for a few seconds.

<David,> Tobias said, <nothing you just said made any sense.>

“Of course you wouldn’t get it,” David snarled. “You’re just a dumb bird.” He looked around at the rest of us, searching our faces for help or sympathy. I was mostly just confused.

“What exactly are you accusing Jake of?” I asked, as gently as I could.

“Isn’t it obvious?” David asked.

“Um, no,” Rachel said. “Nothing you have said is obvious, or comprehensible.”

David pointed an accusing finger at Jake. “He could have used this opportunity to save his own brother. He didn’t. Don’t you guys think that’s a bit suspicious?”

We all exchanged glances. I paid particular attention to Rachel’s expression; she had been more surprised than anyone that Jake had chosen not to go for Tom. But now, she just looked annoyed.

<Not really,> Tobias said. <We agreed that your parents were in more danger, right?>

“What a perfect excuse to make himself look magnanimous,” David responded, lip curling into a snarl. “But you lot just do whatever he says; he could easily have gone for his brother anyway. No leader with that kind of power would do something stupid like throw away that kind of chance on someone else’s family. That’s how I know for sure this was all a setup.”

“What has Jake ever done that suggests to you that he’s that kind of person?” I asked.

“Cassie, I know you’re here because you’re his girlfriend, but if you could take of your rose-tinted goggles for just _one second_ ,” David said, rubbing his temples.

“I’m here because of _what_?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as calm as possible.

“Calm down, it was just a joke,” he said dismissively. “You can be all angry about a joke, but apparently my parents being slaves of the enemy means nothing to any of you people!”

<We literally just tried to save them,> Tobias pointed out.

“I don’t believe that any of you buy that,” David snapped. “Look, I know I’m the new kid here. I know none of you think I’m a real Animorph, even though I work harder and get more done than anyone else here. I know none of you like me.”

“Nobody doesn’t like you, David,” I lied through my teeth.

He rolled his eyes. “Sure. I was kind of hoping you’d actually help, that you’d be glad to get rid of me, but no, you’ve gone with this path instead. Well, I’m not fooled. You want me to believe that you just so magnanimously decided to free my family, at the expense of your own, and you brought enough resources to subdue them when they turned out to be controllers still but right then a freaking alien spaceship just happened to fly right over us? Right over us, there, instead of anywhere else in town, at that exact moment? And you just had to go deal with it right then, taking half of your force with you? What kind of moron do you think I am if you think I’m going to believe any part of that? But I don’t have to believe it, do I? No, I’m just the crazy new kid who nobody likes and nobody has to listen to; basic reason means nothing against the word of the Glorious Leader!”

<Wow,> Marco said. <I don’t believe it. You’re actually fucking crazy. That explains so much.>

“See? That’s exactly what I mean. You’re proving my point. Whoever’s in your little clique can do whatever they want; who cares about anyone else?”

“David,” I said, “I can see why you’ve reached the conclusions you have, but it really, truly isn’t like that. We don’t want your parents in yeerk hands either, and nobody’s against you. We’re a small force fighting a big war, and sometimes bad things happen. It’s hard, I know, but – ”

“How would you know?” he snapped. “What have you given up?”

“David,” Rachel said. “Chill the fuck out.”

Jake raised his hand like he was in school. “If the defense might speak?”

“I’ll allow it,” Marco said in his best sensible-adult-judge voice.

“David. You’re angry, and disappointed, and frustrated. I can understand why.”

“You don’t understand _anything_.”

“This morning, I fought with a yeerk slaver over who drank the last of the orange juice,” he said, folding his arms. “He looked at me through my brother’s eyes while we fought over something stupid that neither of us cared about. For appearances, you know. And I had to pretend not to know what my brother was going through, not to know what was happening in there. But I do know, because I once ended up infested by a yeerk who had been inside Tom’s head. I have undeniable memories about how he’s feeling, how he’d respond, because that yeerk showed me. And I’m not naive enough to hope that his current yeerk is somehow nicer.” He stepped closer to David, who made as if to step back, then stopped himself, glaring instead. “If I were in your position right now, if I’d gotten that close to saving Tom with a bunch of people I’d only known for a couple of months, only to have the whole thing fail because half of them ran off for another mission halfway through? I’d be having similar thoughts and making similar accusations. The whole thing does look pretty damn suspicious. I probably wouldn’t have tried to reason with the team as much as you are, even. You’re very good at keeping your head in a crisis. But I don’t think you’re considering all of the facts.”

“The facts? Like about how you think you get another mindless little soldier so long as you keep stringing me along with the promise of someday freeing my parents, and it’s just such a shame that that’s going to be so much harder now?”

“If I wanted another soldier, why would I leave important hostages with the enemy?” Jake asked reasonably. “If I thought you were the kind of person who wouldn’t fight to protect his planet but would fight to protect his family, then leaving that family with the enemy would make you more of a danger than an asset, wouldn’t it? I definitely wouldn’t stage a fake rescue designed to fail, and draw the enemy’s attention to having someone important, would I? That would be a serious misstep for the ruthless, genius general you seem to think I am.”

“Your rhetoric won’t work on me, Jake. You can try to justify whatever you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that you pushed for this, you ditched halfway through, my family nearly died and now you expect me to trust you again. Screw this.” He turned on one heel and stormed out of the barn, slamming the door behind him.

Jake’s face held the careful neutrality that I was learning to recognise as his Stoic Leader Face. “Can somebody go make sure – ”

<I’ll stop him from doing anything fatal,> Tobias assured him, taking off from the rafters.

I took advantage of the sudden stunned peace to start cleaning Jake’s blood off the floor.

“I am really starting to hate that guy,” Marco said.

“He’s going through a lot,” I said.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t, just that I don’t like him. Are you going to say you like hanging out with him?”

“That’s not really the point,” I said. I poured fluid from a blue jug onto the concrete floor and scrubbed at it with a wire brush. Jake looked like he wanted to help me, but clearly had no idea how, so he hovered awkwardly. I pretended not to notice. “Ax, can you get – uh, can somebody get that rag over there?”

I was duly handed a rag, which I used to mop up the bloody fluid. Getting blood out of concrete is impossible, but you can at least sterilise it and fade the stain pretty quickly.

“You’re just upset that David stole your complaining gig, Marco,” Rachel said, presumably because she was expected to – there was no enthusiasm of belief in her tone. Marco didn’t even bother to respond.

Everyone was silent for several seconds, before Rachel said, “Do you think we should have left Tobias alone to – ”

“Maybe we should – ”

“Yeah.”

And with that, Rachel and Marco left. Jake looked after them, like he wanted to follow.

“It’s probably best if you don’t,” I pointed out. “David seeing you can only escalate things.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

He shrugged. “There’s not much to – ”

“Jake.”

Jake met my gaze, then looked away. He sighed. I put a hand on his shoulder, guided him over to a bale of hay, and made him sit down. He put his head in his hands. “Pretty much everything I’ve done since those andalites showed up is a colossal failure, isn’t it.”

“What do you mean?”

“What don’t I mean? We started off with Gonrod on totally the wrong foot, then I sent Ax to work with them just because they were andalites and they were here to kill his enemy, only it turned out they were some kind of convict gang or something?”

“We only know Gonrod and Aloth are criminals,” I pointed out. “And Aloth’s dead.”

“Because Gonrod shot him. In front of Ax, it looks like. What kind of leader does something like that?”

“Given that he probably knows a lot of important military secrets, a good one, I’d hope. If I were in that situation, knowing about the other Animorphs, knowing about the chee, knowing everything else I know, what would you do, Jake?”

Jake looked away. “Don’t even say that. Never say that.”

I was tempted to press the issue. Tempted to make him admit he’d do the right thing, like Gonrod had, because I needed to hear it. I needed to believe it.

But this wasn’t about what I needed.

“Sorry,” I said. “But you made the right call with Ax. It’s not like you could have kept him from his people. Even if we had known about Gonrod and Aloth – and we don’t even know what they did, they might have been perfectly reasonable things, we both know andalite laws can be ridiculous – it still would have been the right call. It’s not like you made him go. As for the wrong foot with Gonrod, there was never going to be a right one. We’re just a bunch of primitive natives cluttering up his battlefield. You were actually pretty damn impressive out there.”

“But what about with David’s parents? He was right, you know. The only thing he got wrong was thinking there was malice instead of stupidity. That plan was stupid and rushed, and I sealed its doom by taking half the team away in the middle like that. We knew there was a chance they’d be controllers. We’d prepared for this. And there were controllers, and there was an ambush, and the Animorphs didn’t have enough people there to complete the mission because I’d pulled half of us away to argue with aliens.”

“We have no reason to believe it would have worked even with all of us there,” I pointed out.

“We have no reason to believe it wouldn’t have! David’s an Animorph. I owed him that chance.”

I didn’t answer right away. It occurred to me that, despite all of David’s needling, Jake didn’t seem to find him as annoying as the rest of us. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why. David had no respect for Ax or Tobias (the ‘alien’ and the ‘pet bird’), and not much more for me and Rachel, being girls, although he tried to be nice to Rachel to her face. (I tried not to feel bad about that. It wasn’t like I even wanted someone like David being fake-nice to me because I was pretty.) The only people on the team he seemed to have any respect for were Jake and Marco, and he and Marco had been butting heads since the beginning. All of his complaints about Jake were based on the assumption that Jake was a really intelligent, really capable leader moving us inferior people around like pawns on a chessboard. That was probably a lot less irritating to deal with.

But my job wasn’t to vent about David. If anything I needed Jake and David to get along better, not worse. “You made the only call you could,” I said. “You couldn’t have just ignored an andalite spaceship. We had no idea what they were doing – until we were well on our way following them, we didn’t even know where they were going. All our information said they should still be in the forest, preparing for tomorrow’s attack. You had to follow that up.”

“I didn’t have to bring the two of you.”

“Yes, you did. You didn’t know what you were facing. Your mistake in the first meeting was not bringing enough Animorphs, and it was lucky the others decided to come anyway. What were you going to do, bring none? Jake, this was going to go bad, no matter what you did. You’re saying David was right, but he would have found a problem with whatever you did. Save Tom instead? Selfish, using the team for your own needs. Save no one? Coward, missing a perfect opportunity so you can string him along longer. There were no good calls to make here. There was no right way for things to go.”

“There should have been,” Jake said.

“Yeah, well, sometimes there isn’t. I mean… last month, we were on an alien planet, killing people that had nothing to do with us in… in what they thought was a game. You _died_ , Jake. And then we won, and those people died, to save yeerks. Why? What did any of that have to do with us? So that someday, in a few million years, some yeerk might stumble on some iskoort and see another way forward, long after their empire has consumed humanity and andalites and everything else in this quarter or so of the galaxy? And before that, we were on Leera, and we had to blow up the entire land mass, Jake; that’s like a quarter of the planet! We had to kill a quarter of a planet to stop the yeerks. And everyone acts like it’s fine, because sapient natives didn’t live there, like it’s okay to just cause massive ecological destruction and wipe out countless species if they don’t happen to be sapient, and that’s not okay, Jake, it isn’t! But we had to do it anyway, because every other option was so much worse! And now the Leerans are going to spend who-knows-how-many decades or centuries adapting to an entirely new system of planetary ecosystems, because you can’t just do something like that and expect to end up with the same sort of planet you started with. And before that I did something really stupid and gambled my own life for peace with a yeerk, and it’s not gambling my own life that was the problem but as I did it I knew, I knew that one of you was going to have to kill me, that I was putting that on you; and before that Marco had to choose between saving us and not killing his own mother and I still don’t think she survived that even though Marco clearly does and in between it all, Jake, we’re killing innocent people every damn time we go into battle, trading innocent lives for the greater good, hoping that killing some now will help free more. Everything we do is like this, Jake. There aren’t always good answers. There are bad ones and worse ones, and in those circumstances, picking the bad ones doesn’t make you a bad leader. The last few days have sucked. We do the best we can. We move on.”

Jake thought about this a moment, then finally, nodded. “And we hope that, between the andalites and David, there’s still a planet to save after tomorrow.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But I was quickly interrupted by urgent thought-speak. I recognised Ax’s voice.

<Cassie! Are you home? We must contact Prince Jake!>


	19. Chapter 19

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“Hear what?” Jake asked.

“Ax is here. He’s looking for you. Gimme a sec.” I started to morph Rachel; she was the morph I had most like myself, and therefore my fastest. As soon as my thought-speak kicked in, I said, <Ax, Jake is here with me, in the barn. Where are you? Is everything alright?>

<Is everyone there?>

<No, just us. Is everything okay?>

<Yes. For now.> The barn door opened. Ax came in, in human morph. His morphing shirt was torn and there were deep scratches on his feet; he must have moved through the forest as a human. He led someone else inside; a pale-skinned, naked teenage girl, gripping his hand so tightly that both of them had white knuckles. It took me a few seconds to recognise her as Estrid’s human morph. Jake blushed and looked away; I scrambled through our supply of post-morphing clothes for something that would fit her.

“What’s wrong?” Jake asked, suddenly all business.

“We have encountered an issue,” Estrid said, slurring her words slightly.

“What kind of issue? Is everyone okay?”

“Yes. Aximili, this was a bad idea. We should return and – ”

“I told you, Estrid; I’ll help you get away from your Prince if you agree to trust mine. Well, here he is.”

Estrid looked like she wanted to argue, but decided against it. To Jake, she said, “Arbat and Gonrod are fighting. The whole team’s falling apart; we have a limited amount of time to complete our mission before we get discovered by the yeerks, and Gonrod won’t listen!”

“Why do you think you’re going to get discovered by the yeerks?” I asked, handing her a shirt and baggy shorts. “Ax has been hiding on Earth for ages and they haven’t found him yet.”

“You have to trust me,” she said.

“Do I?” I asked.

“Estrid.” Ax started helping her get dressed. “You promised to be honest with them.”

“Fine. But I don’t see why it should matter to them.” She opened her hand, the one that hadn’t been clutching Ax’s. In it was a small, black, round ball, like a large marble. It wasn’t quite spherical, I noticed; more like an unusually round egg.

“This is a weapon,” she explained. “It will remain stable for about two more days, so we have time for some delays, but not the sort of delays that Gonrod’s incessant bantering will cause. Arbat sent Aximili and me to complete the mission while he distracts him, but we must do so before Gonrod finds us.”

“He does not know what our human morphs look like,” Ax explained, finishing with Estrid’s buttons and helping her step into the shorts. I redid the buttons properly.

“And that thing’s going to kill Visser Three?” Jake asked, closely inspecting the egg.

“Probably. But assassinating Visser Three is not our real goal.”

“You lied to us,” Jake said. He thought about that. “No. Gonrod didn’t lie… he didn’t know, did he? This was Arbat’s mission.”

“Yes,” Estrid said.

“So what are you here to do?”

Estrid met his eyes. “We’re here to eliminate every yeerk on this planet.”

“What?” I asked.

“This is a newly created virus. It targets and destroys yeerks. It has a reasonably long incubation phase, but it is also fatal, so it will spread far, and then kill the yeerks. If we are lucky, the infection may even spread offworld; if it does not, the yeerks here will be eliminated.”

“Where did you get something like that?” I asked.

“I created it myself.”

“You’re not an _aristh_? You engineer bioweapons?”

“I am an _aristh_ , but I was not recruited through a normal draft or volunteer process. I was specifically recruited for this mission, by Arbat.”

Jake eyed the egg critically. “And it just infects yeerks?”

“That is correct.”

“Hmm. This doesn’t make sense to me. Okay, a mission like this had to be top secret, I get that. I see why you packaged it as a different top secret mission and lied to us about it. But shouldn’t your commander know what was going on? This all feels kind of shady.”

“We’re lurking in a barn with two aliens hiding from their superior officer and an alien bioweapon,” I told Jake. “Everything about this is shady.”

“Gonrod didn’t need to know,” Estrid said. “It was of the utmost importance that this mission be kept secret. You have seen his skill at keeping secrets.”

“Then why bring him?” I asked. “Why didn’t High Command send you with a better captain and sniper?”

“Because it is Arbat’s mission.” Impatience was beginning to creep into Estrid’s voice. “Arbat-Elivat-Estoni, brother of Alloran-Semitor-Corass. The military doesn’t take him seriously--they won’t give him a chance. He’s the greatest strategic mind in living memory, but even when he was in the military he was looked down upon for his feminine interest in science; he scraped ahead and became a legend in his own right, but with his brother’s disgrace, what was he supposed to do? He hadn’t been in the military since a good decade before I was born. How do you think it would go, showing up in front of the High Command, a male scientist, saying ‘hey, my female student and I should join the army because we have this way to free a planet from yeerks’? They granted us a ship and a crew because it’s a good plan. But this backwater planet, and the two of us, and an experimental virus don’t qualify for high value military assets.”

“Okay,” Jake said. “What do you need from me?”

“To get into the Yeerk Pool,” Estrid said. “That will give the virus the best chance to spread far and wide before symptoms start to show. Gonrod seems to think Aloth was right, and that we can kill Visser Three without getting into the Pool; we can’t let him complete the recorded mission and order us home before releasing this.”

“So we need to go on another mission to the Yeerk Pool,” Jake said wearily.

“No. Aximili and I are perfectly capable of completing the mission. But we need to know where an entrance is.”

“They have Gleet Biofilters on all the intrances now,” I warned her.

Estrid giggled. “I do not foresee any difficulty in bypassing a simple biofilter.”

Jake and I exchanged a glance. I hadn’t demorphed, so I was able to say privately, <I don’t like this. I know we’re fighting a war, I know the yeerks in that pool are our enemies, but… well, in hundreds of wars, people have felt that they had a good enough reason to use bioweapons, and every time, it’s gone really bad. I have trouble believing that we’re going to be the exception.>

“My species does not condone the use of bioweapons,” Jake said aloud.

“But Prince Jake, in the World Almanac – ”

“We are not supposed to condone the use of bioweapons,” Jake corrected himself. “But… well, the lines in this war are a lot cleaner than we’re used to. This isn’t two groups of humans in different uniforms fighting over money or land. This is one species defending its freedom against an invading species. Just because they’re not appropriate for human wars, well, I don’t know if that applies here.”

“Jake, you’re talking about bioweapons,” I reminded him.

“I know. But I’m trying not to think in terms of buzzwords here, about good and bad. Like you said, we don’t have any good choices. But either those yeerks die due to this virus, or we kill them manually inside their hosts. The virus is more effective, and destroys less innocent lives.”

 _What about yeerks like Aftran?_ I wanted to ask, but didn’t. It didn’t seem a wise thing to openly bring up in front of andalites, and besides, I already knew the answer – such yeerks weren’t more innocent than the hosts we could potentially save, especially if you took their past actions into account. I couldn’t value the potential for a yeerk to someday not be evil over the here-and-now life of their victim. I wouldn’t treat hosts as just yeerk weapons, as Jara Hamee had put it. I wouldn’t repeat the andalites’ mistake.

Besides, we needed andalite help, and it looked like Estrid was the best we were going to get.

I sighed. “We should vote on something like this.”

“I agree,” Jake said. “Please excuse us, Estrid. We need to find and gather our team.”


	20. Chapter 20

The other Animorphs had followed David back to the King house, which was messier than I’d ever seen it. I guess that’s what you get when you put a homeless teenage boy alone in a house usually occupied by androids.

The vote went exactly how I’d expected. The only person who showed any reluctance at all to using the virus was Tobias but, like me, he couldn’t seem to find any good reason that would convince the others. We both abstained from the vote, as did Jake, but it was Jake’s normal policy to abstain unless he needed to break a tie. Three in favour.

We were infecting the yeerks, I supposed.

Tobias gave them directions to an entrance in a Wendy’s that wouldn’t open until seven in the morning. His own little rebellion, I supposed, making them wait.

I went home. My dad was at the kitchen table, surrounded by stacks of paper. I peered at one; it was a poster. A friendly-looking raccoon stared out of the page under the title RABIES – IT’S NOT ALWAYS VICIOUS, and surrounded by dot pointed rabies facts.

“Giving that color printer another workout?” I asked.

Dad nodded. “Rabies awareness campaign. Some environmental survey group has told the government there might be a peak in rabies cases coming up, so while they’re out vaccinating every stray dog they can find, we’ve been commissioned for this to stop well-meaning citizens from trying to catch ‘injured’ wildlife and bring it to us.”

I looked more closely at the poster. It didn’t say anything I didn’t already know. Rabies was one hundred per cent fatal once symptoms started to show, so it had to be taken very seriously. It was a virus spread through body fluids, and like any virus, its symptoms made it easier to spread it around. Everyone knew that it made animals vicious, but the symptoms started before that, making nocturnal animals more diurnal and making them appear docile and friendly to get closer to potential hosts. Swallowing caused painful throat spasms, so infected animals tended to drool, getting their infected saliva all over themselves and everything else. Only when the disease was very progressed did the host become violent, and soon after that, the nervous system started to shut down, slowly paralysing the host until they suffocated. It was in this last stage that people occasionally brought animals to us, afraid they’d been hit by a car or poisoned or something, and we had to sterilise everything and advise them to go to the hospital and get rabies shots immediately while Dad, kitted up in full protective gear, took the poor animal into the surgery and prepared the needle for euthenasia.

The complicated array of symptoms surprised a lot of people, but it made perfect sense once you understood that the most important part of any virus was how it transmitted itself to new hosts. I nodded my approval of the poster design, kissed my dad goodnight, and went to bed.

Not that it was possible to sleep, through the TV static. The crackling echoed through the cave, and in the end I had to get up, step carefully over the sleeping hork-bajir, and try to tune it to a station – any station – just to stop the sound. But tuning it turned out to be more difficult than expected. One moment, the image sharpened into a bright yellow snake hanging in what looked to be Amazonian jungle treetops, only to slide away back into white snow; then a small wooden shelter built in a tree using what looked like andalite building techniques, but too far off the ground to be andalite work. For almost an entire second I was able to focus on a bright, transparent ocean that I recognised as the waters of Leera, before that, too, faded into snow.

“I can’t get a clear picture,” I complained to Jara.

“What you try to see?” he asked me.

“I don’t know. Anything but static, I guess?”

He shook his head. “How will you see, if not know what you are looking for?”

“Andalites, I guess,” I said. “We have to get them here. We need them to save us. We can’t keep this up forever, not by ourselves.” An image came into focus; Ax, looking directly out at me, talking urgently.

<I cannot survive much longer. Come.>

But it quickly morphed into Estrid, then Elfangor, then Samalin, changing until it was a bland average of every andalite I’d ever met.

“Be careful with andalites,” Jara advised me. “They are very good at what they do. They keep eight of every ten hork-bajir away from the yeerks.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said, focusing my attention back on the television. But my mind was wandering, and with it, the image. I didn’t have time for hork-bajir nonsense. David was still angry at everyone, and I was supposed to be helping Dad prepare for his rabies awareness campaign and advocate getting animals vaccinated because…

Because…

I sat bolt upright in bed, suddenly wide awake. It was sunrise. I tried to regather the scattered remnants of my thoughts, dimly aware that two completely separate trains of thought had switched onto the same track and ran right into each other in a horrific accident with no survivors.

Ah, right. That was it.

All of the humans were going to die.


	21. Chapter 21

My first impulse was to run right out and try to solve the problem immediately, but I knew I’d need backup. I got halfway through dialling Jake’s number and stopped. Somehow, I didn’t think six in the morning was an unsuspicious time to be calling. But it’d take time to fly out and get everyone, even if I had Tobias’ help. Rachel had a family who would be suspicious, too; Marco was a better bet, but his dad already thought he might be in a gang…

David would be home alone. I called the Kings, and dredged up my talking-to-David conversation tactics.

He picked up on the third ring. “Mmm?”

“David, it’s Cassie.”

“It’s like three in the morning.”

“It’s six, and we need to save the world. I’m not even being hyperbolic. Can you get the rest of the humans on the team together? You’re way closer to them than I am, and I can’t call them at this hour.”

“Whatever it is I’m sure it doesn’t – ”

“If we let Estrid and Ax get into the Yeerk Pool, humanity dies. The fate of the entire world rests on your shoulders, so get out of bed and go tell Jake, Marco and Rachel what they need to do.”

There was no response for a few seconds and I wondered if I’d laid it on too thick, but then I heard a closet door creak open; he was just getting ready. “Where are we meeting?”

I gave him the Wendy’s address where Ax and Estrid would be entering the Yeerk Pool. I swung by Tobias’ meadow, but he wasn’t there; he must be with Rachel.

It was a good thing I’d called for backup, because Ax and Estrid were already there in their human morphs, both dressed so badly even I could tell it was bad, when I arrived. The others had already pulled them into an alley far enough from the Wendy’s not to be overheard, apparently recently, because Estrid was still demanding to know what the problem was.

“We have a mission! Tell us what you need from us so that we can be on our way!”

“I told you,” Jake said wearily, “we have to wait for Cassie.”

<I’m here,> I said, landing on the lid of a dumpster and starting to demorph.

“What’s this about?” David asked, crossing his arms.

“I, too, have that question,” Ax added.

<Ax,> I said. <Estrid.> I shuffled on the dumpster to keep my balance as my body grew and my legs filled out. <What happened to the hork-bajir?>

The two andalites exchanged a glance.

“I do not understand,” Ax said. “Is there a problem with the free colony?”

“There’s a free hork-bajir colony?!” Estrid asked.

<Not them,> I said. <In the past. Jara says you, the andalites I mean, killed eighty per cent of the hork-bajir. That’s why they hate your kind, isn’t it?>

“So?” Marco asked, shrugging. “Free or dead. We kill hork-bajir all the time. It’s sad, but we can’t blame the andalites for fighting this war.”

“And Jara’s never held that against us,” Jake said.

<Exactly. He hasn’t.> I used my newly human arms to reposition myself so that I was sitting on the edge of the dumpster. <He knows war like the rest of us. But he despises andalites. And the way he phrased it… I didn’t notice at the time, but he didn’t say that the andalites freed those hork-bajir or anything like that. He said they ‘kept them away from the yeerks’.>

<Oh!> Tobias said. <You’re talking about the quantum virus.>

“The _what_?!” Rachel asked.

<I asked Ax about this after Jara told me about the war. Tell them, Ax.>

“The yeerks use many methods to squash rebellion in their hosts,” Ax said. “One of those is to make andalites out to be the enemy. They spread stories among the hork-bajir of andalite treachery, claiming that andalites released a quantum virus to kill the hork-bajir. It is not surprising that they would teach such things to captive hork-bajir children like Jara.”

“Jara said it’s a family story,” I said, hopping down to the ground. “His grandparents were rebels. His grandmother was an andalite.”

<Impossible!> Ax said mentally.

“Her name was…” I frowned, trying to think.

< Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan,> Tobias supplied.

“Aldrea went missing in action during the war on the hork-bajir homeworld,” Estrid said. “She was also one of the first andalites to gain morphing abilities, via a family friend. It is not impossible.”

“No andalite would ever mate with an alien,” Ax said, sounding revolted.

Estrid shrugged. “She was generally considered to be… mentally unusual. She wanted to be a warrior, even before the yeerks attacked her family. Imagine.”

“You seem to know a lot about her,” Jake said. I don’t think he meant for it to sound like an accusation.

Estrid met his gaze levelly. “Yes,” she said, “I researched other _thelin_ of our age thoroughly before we embarked. It seemed like reasonable preparation.”

“It doesn’t really matter who Jara’s grandparents are,” David said. “He was born a yeerk slave, right? They probably put some poor hork-bajir controller in with the kids and had him pretend to be uninfested for the moment and pass along fake stories. His knowledge of history can’t be trusted. it’s all gonna be propaganda.”

“Unlike andalite stories,” Rachel said mildly, “which are of course completely reliable. Andalite military don’t ever tell convenient lies, do they, Ax?”

“My people may have to control some information for the good of the People and their morale,” Ax said, “but they would never release a bioweapon on a planet full of innocents.”

“Control some information for morale?” Marco snapped. “They threw you under the fucking bus! They made you take the fall for a Seerow’s Kindness breach that you had nothing to do with!”

“Axmili is innocent?” Estrid asked, looking confused. Marco turned to her.

“And nobody told you about us, even though you were coming to our planet,” he said. “Why was that, I wonder? Whoever told your captain about the Ascalin gave him some half-complete version, since he seems to think we had something to do with its destruction instead of that traitor captain, and they seem to have left out entirely the part where we saved Leera. And you guys are telling us… what, this thing is an exception? That Jara must be wrong because his history is unreliable, but yours is somehow super reliable? Even while one of you _is holding a bioweapon as we speak_?”

“For yeerks,” Ax said, sounding irritated. “You all agreed to use this. Why are you delaying Estrid now?”

“What’s the transmission vector, Estrid?” I asked quietly.

“What?”

“The vector. For the virus to get from one yeerk into another.”

<That’s the Yeerk Pool, isn’t it?> Tobias asked. <That’s why they’re dumping it into the Yeerk Pool.>

I nodded. “A great way to get it into lots of yeerks at once and get a huge head start before they realise what’s happening, I’m sure. But they’re going to realise what’s happening at some point, and when they do, they’ll stop it from spreading. A Yeerk Pool would be incredibly easy to quarantine. They just have to dig a second hole and fill it with sludge while they drain and clean the first one; yes, it would be a serious setback and they’d have to sacrifice a lot of yeerks, but you could’ve achieved the same result with a bomb or poison, right? Why go to the trouble of inventing a fancy virus?”

Estrid hadn’t had much practice at controlling her human morph. Her nervousness was obvious. “I can’t stand around explaining complicated virology to you,” she said. “Trust me, we wouldn’t have come all the way out here if we didn’t know what we were doing.”

“Why did you come all the way out here?” Marco asked, frowning. “I thought we were so far down the andalite priority list because we’re off in the middle of nowhere? Wouldn’t you want to release it somewhere that yeerks moved around a lot, so they could carry it to other Yeerk Pools?”

<Maybe they’re releasing it in a lot of places?> Tobias asked.

Jake shook his head. “Estrid created this virus. Didn’t you? She wouldn’t come all the way out here, personally, with this super-secret crew on this super-secret mission, if it was just being sent everywhere.”

“It spreads from human to human, doesn’t it?” I asked Estrid quietly. “Yeerks only have contact with each other in a very easily controlled place, every three days. But humans have contact with each other everywhere, all the time. They’re so much harder to quarantine, especially secretly, and we spread diseases to each other in so many different ways. Waterborne diseases cause diarrhoea or get in the urine and end up in areas without really good water treatment. Fluid-borne diseases hide secretly in the blood, or change the host’s behaviour to make them drool and try to bite things. Airborne diseases get in the lungs and make us cough. I’m guessing this one would be airborne, right? To spread well in this city? How did you ever create such a thing without any humans to test it on?”

“Exactly!” she said. “Without human test subjects, such a thing can’t happen. You are all getting very paranoid over nothing.”

<They have biological data from five humans,> Tobias pointed out. <From the Ascalin. And didn’t you let an andalite warrior acquire you on Leera, Cassie?>

“They might have more biological data,” Marco said. “They’ve been hanging around here long enough for humans to have an outdated andalite toilet. The Ascalin guys didn’t know anything about humans, but they weren’t expecting to run into any, so...” he shrugged.

<Ax didn’t know much about human biology before coming here either,> Tobias pointed out, <and he came here on purpose.>

“Ax was terrible at exobiology,” Marco pointed out.

“I was perfectly competent,” Ax said defensively. “The material was simply not very engaging. But you are all jumping to conclusions based on very little. Estrid came here to kill yeerks, and she is a biological prodigy; I am sure that she has included more advanced methods of transmission than something as basic as the human lung.”

“I’m just a primitive human,” I said, “but even I can tell you that there is nothing at all ‘basic’ about a bioweapon that can travel from the lung, into the blood, through the blood-brain barrier, and then infect and kill an alien species. You would indeed have to be a genius to do it.” I watched Estrid as I spoke. Was she looking pleased at what I’d just said? Flattered? “And she’s dumping it in the Yeerk Pool, so it can clearly be transmitted via the Yeerk Pool, but as we’ve already said, that’s not practical on its own. Not for someone who came all the way out here, with their precious designer virus, to a world with very little yeerk traffic that the andalites don’t seem to care about. So if we are jumping to the wrong conclusions, what’s the right one, Estrid?”

Estrid scanned the line of furious faces, unconsciously stepping back against a wall. Ax stepped in front of her protectively.

“I am sure that there is a reasonable explanation for this,” he said. “Estrid is a scientist of the People, and an _aristh_ of the military. Her honor would never allow her to slaughter a planet of allies like that.”

“Sure it wouldn’t, Ax,” Marco said, rolling his eyes.

Estrid spoke up. “It is true that the host uses humans for transmission. But it is harmless. There are many, many viruses that do not kill, or even harm, their hosts! Rendering humans immune to long-term yeerk infestation with such a benign infection would be an advantage to your species!”

“Yes,” I said, “it would. And yeerk biology is probably really, really different to human biology, so the sort of things that kill yeerks and the sort of things that kill humans are probably going to be different, too. But the viruses you talk about are that way because they started out far more dangerous, and evolved in concert with their host species. It’s to the advantage of both host and virus for the host to remain as healthy as possible for as long as possible. You want us to believe that this newly invented virus, made with what has to be very limited information on human biology, is going to be safe? No. No way.”

Ax said, “Estrid is the greatest andalite scientific prodigy since – ”

“I don’t care how smart she is, it’s a matter of elementary data. She can’t possibly have enough information on human biology or biodiversity to make a virus that she can be reasonably confident is safe and is still going to work. Do you know how many immune defenses the human body has between the airway and the brain? Do you know how hard it would be for an airborne virus to get in there, especially if it’s designed to do so from the get-go, first try, and then infest a _completely alien being_ inside there? And it’s starting in the Yeerk Pool, meaning it has to be able to go the other way as well; starting in the brain and moving to the lungs. Every step of that journey, the subtler the virus is, the higher the chances of failure. The slower it reproduces to keep the host safe, the higher the chances of failure. It’s a trade-off; any attempt to make it safer for humans is going to make it less likely to work at all.”

“And the ‘greatest andalite scientific prodigy’ isn’t going to come all the way out here for this really dangerous mission if it doesn’t have a good chance of working,” Rachel said. “Is she right, Estrid? Does this virus kill humans?”

“Certainly not!” Estrid said. “My calculations are perfect.”

“Your calculations based on what?” I asked. “Ascalin data? Anything else?”

“The simple biology of your species is no match for andalite science,” she said coolly.

<You obviously don’t believe that,> Tobias cut in, <or you wouldn’t be here. If this virus is so benign to humans, you could have landed anywhere in the world and released it. You could have let it slowly, invisibly spread through the population so that when yeerks started mysteriously dying, they’d have no way to track it, and there’d be nothing they could do about it; most of the world would already have it. _That_ would drive the yeerks from earth. It would be perfect and unstoppable. But instead you landed here, on the most dangerous part of the planet for you, and are going on an incredibly dangerous mission to the heart of the enemy’s base to release it, where they’re going to find it and fight against it far sooner. There’s no reason to do that with a benign virus. The only reason to do that is if you think the virus is going to be very messy, and humans are going to quarantine it before it reaches the yeerks. So how sure can you possibly be about this virus being safe, if you’re going to do this really dangerous, weaker plan instead of the safer, almost-guaranteed-to-work plan that might actually drive the yeerks off Earth? You can’t be _that_ sure. >

Ax looked from Tobias to Estrid. “Estrid,” he said quietly. Pleadingly.

Estrid didn’t know how to hide human emotions. Her face was flushed, and she wasn’t meeting his eyes. “They could be fine,” she mumbled.

“They could be?”

“It’s as reliable as I can make it with the data I had!” she snapped. “This is war, Aximili! We have to do something! Have you read the history of this place? It’s all war, and struggle, and impossibly fast scientific advancement! They put the first human in space less than forty local years ago and they’re already building a space station! Do you think we should leave these people to the yeerks? We can’t! We have to stop yeerk advancement wherever we can! I have done everything I can to protect humanity with this virus, Aximili, but if we stand around waiting for the opportunity for the perfect, clean strike to win, we will lose before we can strike at all!”

“So you decided to bring a supervirus that might kill my friends?!”

<Volume, guys,> Tobias warned us. <People are getting up and about.>

“Your friends can morph,” Estrid said dismissively. “They will be fine.”

“And the rest of their species?”

“Even if the virus does go bad, humans have perfectly adequate healthcare and quarantine practices. This is not the hork-bajir homeworld. They will be able to halt the progression before it takes out even ten per cent of humanity; fifteen in the worst case estimates.”

“Do you have _any idea_ how many people that is?” David asked, his eyes wide.

“It is only ten or fifteen per cent,” Estrid replied. “We destroyed a continent that took up a quarter of the Leeran homeworld to halt the yeerks there.”

“We didn’t kill a quarter of the Leerans!” Ax said.

“Are you suggesting that we would not have, if we had to?” Estrid asked. “Leerans are extremely powerful hosts. Do you think we would hesitate to kill a quarter of them – or every single one of them – in battle if we could, once they had been taken? Of course, it is _honourable_ to wait for somebody to become our enemy, watch them be enslaved and tormented by the yeerks, and then attempt to destroy their species with blades and lasers, but to spare an entire species by removing a small fraction of them before the yeerks can do that to them, that is dishonorable? It is because I am using a _female_ _weapon_ , isn’t it? I’m being a scientist, instead of clubbing things with my tail.”

“Your sex is not relevant. These are innocent people.”

“They’re enemy assets waiting for harvest! They won’t have the luxury to be innocent people until the yeerks are driven away from here, and that’s not going to happen any time soon because nobody seems to be paying any attention! People like you are the reason Arbat left the military to be a scientist in the first place. The entire High Command is filled with people like you; people who don’t see the dangers, the ways this can go. But tell me, Aximili, if War-Prince Alloran hadn’t released that virus on the hork-bajir, how well do you think the andalites would be doing in this war right now? The hork-bajir would be just as lost as they are now; infested or dead. And a lot more andalites would be dead, and a lot more of the people we are defending would be infested. Do you want to see these people, these people who can breed like muskmoss and eat anything and survive a ridiculous range of temperatures, these people who advance so quickly and treat everything they do like war, these people who number billions, in the hands of the Yeerk Empire? High Command aren’t sending ships here because all they see is a planet of low-tech dirtgrubbers! These people can’t defend themselves because they _are_ low-tech dirtgrubbers! Taking this chance is the best thing we can do for them, and for us, and for everyone else fighting on the side of freedom.”

“Killing ten per cent of our population doesn’t sound helpful,” Marco remarked drily.

“You breed so fast that you will recover in one generation,” Estrid said dismissively. “If anything, you are already massively overpopulated. Even if the yeerks were not here, it would be doing you a favor. With them here, it is two favors – if it is harmful to your species at all. Which it might not be.”

“Wait, Alloran?” Rachel asked. “Visser Three Alloran? Is genocide a family trait? You’re not going to turn out to be Arbat’s niece or something are you?”

“You said that the High Command don’t see why this is important,” Jake said. “Your people didn’t authorise this mission, did they?”

“Of course not! They wouldn’t want to win a war dishonorably. They’d rather condemn the true thinkers, raise up puppet heroes, and pretend that fighting for the fate of this corner of the galaxy is like a friendly tail joust. Like you can win neatly and prettily and if you lose, that’s fine because at least you fought with honor. But eventually, this war will reach the homeworld! What are they going to do then? Face insurmountable odds when those species they didn’t try hard enough to save from the yeerks all show up in our atmosphere, infested? Wars are won by action, not old men in soft meadows reviewing reports as if they are playing some sort of game. After all, doing something useful might risk their favor with the People, and then how would they get to keep living their comfortable, useless lives at everyone else’s expense?”

“And would the People approve of you doing this?” Ax asked quietly.

“They don’t need to know!”

“You want to protect them from the true costs of war,” he said. “You think our People are stupid.”

“They’re not stupid, they’re just...”

“Not as smart as you or Arbat? So proper andalite behaviour should be determined by you instead?”

“That’s not what I said!” Estrid snapped. “But they shouldn’t have to make the hard choices like this. These choices are for people like us to make.”

“Hard choices? Like sacrificing somebody else, against their will?”

“Sacrificing other people is harder than sacrificing yourself and you know it.”

“A convenient stance for somebody about to sacrifice others to take. But your family allowed you to become an _aristh_ , did they not?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“They did not know about this mission, but they let you sign up to the military. They knew how dangerous this job is. They sacrificed you, for the good of free people. Clearly, they can make such choices.”

“That’s not the same thing at all, Aximili.”

“No. It is not. Because you came here willingly. And you want to kill off a large fraction of humanity without them even knowing why. I know you have not been here long, Estrid, but after what you have seen of humanity, after the glimpse I have managed to show you, do these people not deserve more than some poorly tested viral plague?”

“There’s no time to – ”

<Yes, there is,> Tobias said. <That’s what we Animorphs are here for. If humans are really as potentially threatening as you say, the last thing you want to do is sour andalite-human relations with something like this. I can guarantee that humans will not forgive something like this. But you’re here now, so what’s stopping you from gathering multiple human morphs and going home to test things properly? To make something better? To come back with a virus that you know is harmless to humans, and make us deadly to yeerks with it then? We’ve protected the earth this long. That’s not going to change.>

I shot Tobias a doubtful look. Hadn’t I been clear about how difficult, maybe impossible, it would be to engineer such a virus? But he just said to me privately, <She obviously thinks she’s smart enough to do anything in the world. Do you want her off researching the impossible, or here releasing that virus?>

Estrid looked from Animorph to Animorph, and finally to Ax.

“I think this is a bad idea,” she said, “but… you are deserving of a chance. To fight for your own planet.” She handed the black egg to Ax. “It should destabilise on its own within ten local days, but if you wish to destroy it for sure, burning it will do so.”

He nodded. “Thank you, Estrid.”

“And now,” she said, “I suppose that we should find Arbat.”

“Arbat?” Marco asked. “What about him? Once the virus is destroyed, what’s he gonna be able to do? He’s already lost.”

“We did not make an interplanetary trip through zero-space carrying only one sample,” she told him, like it was obvious. “Arbat intended to delay Gonrod long enough that Aximili and I could complete the mission, but he will also attempt to complete it himself, in case we have failed. If Gonrod has not figured out his game and stopped him, there is still a very high risk of exposure.”

“And what’s his plan?” Jake asked.

“The same as mine. To release the virus into the Yeerk Pool.”

<There are dozens of entrances, at least,> Tobias said. <I don’t know them all, and we have no way of knowing which one Arbat will try to use.>

“Then there’s nothing for it,” Jake said grimly. “We’ll have to stake out the one place that we know for sure he’s going to go.”

We would have to go down to the Yeerk Pool.


	22. Chapter 22

The entrance turned out to be in an out-of-order stall in the mens’ toilet. After Ax and Estrid refreshed their morphs, we all piled into the stall, then piled into a small room behind a false wall in the side of the stall, and then Estrid took out a cube. It was smaller than the _escafil_ device, and bright red.

“Touch this,” she said, “and keep touching it until the biofilter scan is complete. It will not shield you if you are not making physical contact.”

We all pressed our hands to the cube. The biofilter scanned us, reported a clean scan, and opened a door leading to a tunnel. And that was that.

“I want you along on all of our Yeerk Pool trips,” Marco said. “This is so much easier than normal.”

“The last time a biofilter reported a clean scan, it had alerted the yeerks inside and we walked into an ambush,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure the sinister glowing red box of fancy unknown tech is both safe and foolproof,” Marco said.

“It is a _Pendras_ box,” Estrid told us.

Marco stared at her. “Did you just say Pandora’s Box? You legitimately had us touch something called Pandora’s Box? Jesus! I was joking!”

The journey down the tunnel was every bit as unnerving as it always was. The screams that echoed up the stairs were unmistakeable, and as we got closer, we could hear incoherent pleading. Then, closer still, something worse – the chatter and laughter of infested controllers and temporary free voluntary hosts, completely ignoring the misery around them.

“I keep saying I’m never, ever going down here again,” Marco muttered. “And yet we always end up here.”

“Say it again,” Rachel said. “It might make you feel better.”

“I am never, ever going down here again,” Marco said.

“Okay, people,” Jake said, “the plan should be obvious. Everyone morph enough to disguise their features and keep an eye out for anyone approaching the Pool with a black egg thing. We have no idea who he’s acquired, so recognising him might be tricky. Arm yourself if you get a chance but don’t risk raising an alarm. We want the opposite of chaos today.” He met Rachel’s eyes. “The opposite of chaos.”

“Aye-aye, Prince Jake,” Rachel grinned with a mocking salute.

“Estrid, Ax, has he used a human morph before?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“I have not seen him do so, Prince Jake.”

“Pity. I was hoping he might use the same one twice and we could recognise it. Well, this is probably better; he might be unfamiliar with the morph. Pick out anyone who behaves unusually. Not counting the screaming prisoners, of course.” He looked us over. The human Animorphs had taken the speech time to morph other human features, disguising our looks. Jake nodded. “Okay. I guess it’s showtime, then.”

In we walked; six teenagers in mismatched spandex, two in more complete outfits who kept stumbling on their feet and twisting to look behind them. Eventually, the yeerks were going to learn to look for spandex. And then we were going to have to learn to get more creative.

The Yeerk Pool complex seemed larger than the last time we’d been down there. They were digging a large pit some distance from the Pool itself – probably a second Pool, I realised, but it was far from finished and nothing for us to worry about yet. They had made a few security upgrades since our last visit – upgrades, I realised, which were probably our fault. The last time we’d broken in, Ax had managed to open several cages and start a riot. Said cages had better locks on them now, and the piers were wider, with safety railings that allowed more guards to safely stand on a pier. The involuntary piers had little brackets for the controller to rest their neck on as they bent over the Pool. This helped them keep their balance, so that they wouldn’t need their hands. As each controller knelt and leaned into the bracket, a guard cuffed their hands behind them, waited for the yeerk to exit, and then manhandled the struggling, screaming host into one of the cages. They weren’t uncuffed until they’d been forced into a locking bracket on the involuntary reinfestation pier and had a yeerk slide back into their head to retake control.

“This is obscene,” Estrid muttered.

“Pretend to be unconcerned,” Ax advised her. He put a hand on her arm.

“Nobody act weird,” Jake said. “We don’t want to be IDed down here.”

“Ah yes, we don’t stand out at all,” Marco muttered under his breath.

But nobody was paying us all that much attention. They all had their own lives to be getting on with. I eyed the Pool. At some point, a morphed andalite was going to walk down one of those piers, probably a voluntary infestation pier where he wouldn’t be restrained, drop a black egg into that water, and then calmly walk away. But we couldn’t stand around staring at the Pool until he arrived.

The Animorphs were starting to disperse, but I was still standing right next to Jake, so I heard David lean close to him and mutter, “You know there’s an easy solution to this.” He looked meaningfully at the Yeerk Pool.

“How, though?” Jack murmured back. “We didn’t come down here with the equipment to destroy a Pool. And even if we managed it, we’d never get out in the chaos.”

“Like there isn’t going to be chaos anyway? Look at this place! It has to be destroyed!” He kept his voice low, but I could hear the pain in it. I realised, too late, that this was David’s first look at the Yeerk Pool.

Jake shot me a glace. I gave him a microscopic nod. I was on David-wrangling duty.

“David, can you come to the cafeteria with me?” I asked.

“They have a _cafeteria_ down here?”

I nodded towards said cafeteria. “You’ve seen how they are with food,” I said quietly, not willing to say ‘andalite’ aloud in such a place, even quietly. “If he – ”

“Yeah, I’m coming,” he said. We left at the Pool and headed into a world of socialising controllers, nervous voluntaries, and the smell of fried food. We grabbed some fries – the food was free – took a seat together in the corner, and kept our eyes on the door. I leaned close so that we could whisper to each other. Nobody gave us a second look, or indeed a first one.

“This is disgusting,” David muttered, looking sick. “Absolutely disgusting.”

“I know.”

“These are all yeerks? Just… sitting around and laughing?”

“It’s the only place that they can be themselves,” I pointed out. “Out there, they’re spies in enemy territory. In the Pool, they are blind and silent. This is the only place they can relax. But no, I don’t think they’re all yeerks.” I indicated a man sitting alone with my eyes. “Does that guy look on edge to you?”

“You think it’s him?”

“No. If it was him, he’d be furiously shoving chips into his face. It might be an oatmeal addict starting to be affected by the drug, but he’s probably a voluntary, temporarily free.”

“A traitor,” David growled.

“It’s more complicated than that. Our vice-principal, Chapman, is a voluntary controller. He and his wife both surrendered their freedom on the condition that their daughter, Melissa, stays free.”

“So that makes it okay to sell out the planet?”

“It means that there is no ‘okay’. This invasion is a lot more socially complicated than open war with Martians using ray guns. We’ve tried attacking the Yeerk Pool directly, we’ve tried taking down their supply ships and attacking their food sources, and it does seem to slow them down, but this isn’t a matter of ‘kill as many enemies as possible to increase your chances to win’.”

“Then how do you propose we win?” he asked. “They’re slavers. We can’t play nice with slavers. You of all people should already know that.”

“What do you mean, me of all people?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

“Because you’re… you know.” He gestured at my body with one hand.

I pressed my lips together. I was partly morphed, of course, so my skin wasn’t as dark as it normally was, but I got his point. “How about we just focus on the issue at hand,” I said, trying not to sound upset.

“Good idea.”

I turned my attention back to scanning the room, but less than a minute later, we were interrupted by shouting. I was pretty sure I recognised the voice. It was Rachel.

“Andalite!” she was shouting. “We’re under attack! There’s an andalite here!”


	23. Chapter 23

We bolted out of the cafeteria, along with everyone else in it. Someone in some kind of guard uniform was drawing a gun, a human gun, from his belt, but so far as I could tell everyone else was unarmed. That was not the case in the main Pool complex – several hork-bajir and human guards had drawn Dracon beams and people were clearing a space around Rachel and the middle-aged man that she was attempting to put in a headlock. He was fighting back remarkably well for someone who had just learned to walk on two human legs.

“I saw him morphing!” Rachel insisted, trying to get an arm around his throat. He bit into her arm, drawing blood. Rachel cried out, mostly in surprise, and he slipped out of her hold, pointing an accusing finger.

“Liar! _He_ is the andalite! He was morphing and is trying to deflect suspicion!”

Several people looked from Rachel, clad in a skintight gymnastics outfit and with long blonde hair billowing around her face, to the man.

A voice called out from the crowd – Marco. “What kind of human-controller can’t tell human genders?” he called.

Hork-bajir stepped forward to grab his arms and put their blades to his throat. I relaxed – this had been easier than I’d expected. Now we just needed to get out before they started searching for other potential bandits. I skimmed the crowd, looking for the rest of the Animorphs. Rachel, of course, stepping back into the crowd towards Tobias. Marco was harder to find; he had found some pants and a jacket, and was scanning the exits. Jake was further away from the action and seemed to be trying to keep track of all of us, while Ax and Estrid were pushing their way through the crowd, trying to reach Arbat, both looking very, very worried. Why were they worried? Where was the danger? We’d won; we’d –

“Who’s in charge?” someone called.

“Sub-Visser ninety seven,” an important-looking woman in a suit replied. “Dorane Two Six Four, go alert him. Guards, get him to the Pool.”

“Should I alert Visser Three?”

She pressed her lips together. “That’s the Sub-Visser’s concern,” she said. “Do not alert him until appropriately authorised. That would be rude.” I read between the lines – _Visser Three doesn’t need to know about this until we’re sure he won’t get away. And if he is informed before then, let our superior take the heat for it._

She nodded to the hork-bajir, who were half-carrying Arbat towards the Pool. Great; now he had to save him. We couldn’t let a yeerk learn what he knew. But he wouldn’t let himself be infested, would he? He hated yeerks with a passion, hated them enough to put my species at risk to strike a blow against them. He would cut his own throat on a hork-bajir blade and…

He didn’t seem to be fighting very hard, I noticed. He was struggling a bit, for the look of the thing, but mostly he was…

He was trying to get his hand into his pocket.

And then I realised why Ax and Estrid were trying to get to the front of the crowd. He wanted them to drag him onto that pier. He was going to let them take him out there, drop the egg into the Pool, and kill himself on one of the guards’ blades.

“He’s got the egg, David,” I hissed. “We can’t let him – what are you doing?!”

David’s from was changing; his skin lightening, his height increasing. Within seconds he was his normal self. Then he kept changing; golden fur sprouted from his skin, his nose bulging out.

“We have secret identities, you idiot!” I hissed.

“I don’t,” he replied, words slightly distroted by his changing jaw. “Now get out of my way before you draw any attention to yourself.”

Hiding David from attention was a lot cause; people were already screaming and pointing,

“It’s the human morpher!” someone shouted. “Kill it!”

David was only half-morphed, but his roar was already full force. His bellow buckled knees and shook the nearby cages. I don’t know if you’ve ever been near a roaring lion, but it’s not like watching one roar in a zoo or on a documentary or whatever. The sound is the same (unlike movie gunshots), but it’s so much louder from right next to it, and when something that aggressive is standing that close with no bars or anything between you…

Controllers bolted in all directions, is my point.

This gave him a few seconds of panic to work with, and gave the rest of us more time and chaos to look for somewhere private to morph. But it also meant that armed Controllers had a clearer shot. Several of them raised their weapons, and that was when the red-tailed hawk dropped on them from above.

I didn’t have time to watch the spectacle; I, like several unarmed, civillian controllers, was diving for cover. In my case, it was cover to morph behind rather than hide behind, but they didn’t know that. I ended up rolling under some kind of big drill thing that was being used to dig out the second Yeerk Pool. I was Cassie within seconds, and then focused on the leopard within me.

I trotted out into even greater chaos, of course. The time I’d taken to morph had given the yeerks a chance to either get over their panic or get out of the way. David leapt for Arbat, but the yeerks were not giving up their prize so easily; two controllers, too far from Tobias for him to harass, took aim and fired at the lion mid-leap. A tiger leapt out of nowhere and shoved the lion out of the way, both sustaining Dracon burns… but both surviving. A three-legged Jake landed, rolled, dashed for cover, David, ribs visible through a wound that looked like a white-hot ice cream scoop had been raked down his side, landed on all four paws and skidded head-first into a cage full of involuntaries.

Arbat was on the pier by then. The yeerk plan was pretty obvious; they had one live andalite bandit, the rest of us weren’t targets. If they could get a yeerk into one of our heads, they’d know where our base was, know all the military secrets of the guerrilla force that had plagued them since the battle that had wiped out the andalite’s air forces around Earth. And they’d have another morphing host. Visser Three might have risked such a boon by waiting to gloat, by using the andalite captive as a hostage to try for a bigger prize… but Visser Three wasn’t there.

Arbat was. His hand emerged from his pocket, holding some sort of small, round object.

Jake and David were injured and dazed; a crowd of enemies separated me from the pier; I had no idea where Rachel or Marco or Ax were; Tobias was diving, diving, but he was too high, and all Arbat had to do was open his hand…

He opened his hand. The object dropped. My mind filled with Animorph screams of rage, fear, frustration, desperation; some of them mine.

The shiny black egg dropped toward the Pool.

And flashed bright, vanishing in a puff of smoke.

The yeerks didn’t seem to notice; their first indication that anything had happened was Arbat stiffening and bellowing, “Noooooo!”

The Shredder beam had left a scorch mark on the rock next to the Pool. I tracked where it had come from. There, by one of the entrances; two juvenile andalites, a boy and a girl. Between them stood an adult male warrior. The girl held a shredder in both hands, still raised.

<Very good work, _aristh_ Estrid,> Gonrod said, his voice full of pride. <I see that you paid attention to Aloth after all. Now hand me the Shredder. _Aristh_ Aximili, prepare the extraction. >

I knew what was going to happen next. There was simply no way to extract Arbat from the yeerks; they were already forcing him down toward the Pool, and he was stunned from his failure; not fighting back, not morphing, not making use of those hork-bajir blades.

I looked away from Arbat. I didn’t watch Gonrod fire. I didn’t blame him, though. It was a war, and we could try our best, but sometimes there just weren’t any good decisions.

<Prince Jake, I have an exit,> Ax reported.

<Everyone to Ax!> Jake commanded.

I followed orders. There wasn’t much else to do.


	24. Chapter 24

The sun was high. A gentle breeze rustled through the trees. Together, the andalite commander and his single _aristh_ finished deconstructing the camouflage covering their ship.

Estrid ran one hand slowly down the side of Ax’s face, and down his neck. <Aximili,> she said.

<My place is here, for now,> he replied gently. <But travel safe.>

< _Aristh_ Estrid, prepare the ship for launch, > Gonrod said sharply. She hesitated, but after a moment, boarded.

“Goodbye, Commander Gonrod,” Jake said. “Despite the less-than-perfect circumstances, I am glad to have met you.”

<And I you, Prince Jake,> Gonrod replied. <I am more confident in the future of your planet after seeing you fight for it.>

“It’s all we have,” Jake shrugged.

<True enough.>

Jake looked at the ship. “What’s going to happen to her?”

<We are two war criminals returning with what I have just learned is a stolen ship,> Gonrod said. <I do not know what is going to happen, but I daresay there will be an extremely awkward trial involved. I doubt it will be as bad as you are imagining, however. She is only a female, and with a mind that cannot be wasted – she will probably be bundled into non-military projects to benefit the People for the rest of her life, and simply watched a lot more carefully than most scientists. And my only new crime was gullibility.>

I could see the curiosity on Jake’s face. I understood it; I, too, wanted to know what exactly Gonrod had done in the past. But he resisted the urge to ask, and instead said, “You don’t have to leave, you know. We’re in desperate need of troops down here – an andalite Prince and a genius scientist could do real good on this planet. You can stay here and keep fighting honorably, without having to go back.”

<As you have already said. And I am sorry that we must refuse. This is not our place.> He glanced at Ax, then back. <Aximili has found his place, but Estrid and myself can do more good for this war elsewhere.>

Jake cocked his head. “Even as dishonored war criminals?”

Gonrod laughed. <Honor is not something given by a government or tribunal or the Laws or even by the People. Those things are important guidelines, but it is ultimately something that you must give yourself.> His eyes twinkled with amusement that I’d never seen in them before. <Or do you always work in accordance with the Laws of your People, Prince Jake?>

Jake laughed. “You’ve got me there. Keep fighting with honor, then, Commander.”

<Every day.>

The two gave each other an andalite salute, Gonrod with his tailblade and Jake with a flat hand. Then Gonrod boarded the ship, the doors closed, and the engines started to glow.

“There goes your hot andalite babe, Ax,” Marco said, shaking his head in mock sadness. “Just leaving you on a planet and vanishing off into space. How rejected do you feel?”

<Estrid is very beautiful,> Ax admitted, <and even more brilliant. But...> he broke off, watching the ship rise from the forest floor and start to gain altitude.

“But?” Marco prompted as the ship sailed off over the forest.

<But I do not think that I like her very much,> Ax admitted. The andalite ship disappeared behind an invisibility shield, and the sky was empty once more.


	25. Chapter 25

As I entered Ax’s clearing, I could see an eagle angrily flap its way up into the sky and soar away.

“Was that David?” I asked.

<Yes,> Ax said. <He is somewhat angry with us. He does not think that ‘letting that alien who wanted to kill us all just go off scot-free’ was very safe.>

“And what did you tell him?”

<I told him that Estrid was clever enough to make a virus that might not kill humans, and that in the future, she may be able to make one that definitely won’t, and it will be your great weapon against the yeerks. I told him that there are probably hundreds of andalites who can perform the far more trivial task of creating a virus that would definitely kill humans.> He eyed me with one stalk eye. <I do not think he found that very comforting.>

“You don’t like him, do you?”

<I have no idea what you mean.> He watched the sky.

After a long silence, I said, “You could have gone with them, you know.”

<I know.>

“You could’ve gone home.”

<Yes.>

“You don’t owe us your help down here.”

<I recall having this conversation with you already, before they left. With each of you, in fact.>

“Why _didn’t_ you?” I asked. “We’re your friends, and I’m so glad to have you here, but you have a family and a home and – ”

<And if I had boarded that ship, I would have gotten to go there. I would have been able to touch my mother and my father, to taste the grass of my childhood, under my suns. And then the tribunal would have verified my pardon for breaking Seerow’s Kindness, debriefed me on the situation on Earth, and packed me off on another ship, under another Prince, to keep fighting the yeerk threat wherever they thought I was needed. But I am needed _here_ , Cassie. I am needed because another such ship might come along with another plan that risks your people. I am needed because the yeerks might once again bring in new technology or expose us to new aliens that I recognise and you do not. If I had stepped on that ship, I would have relinquished control over my destiny to High Command. And even if it means seeing my family and friends once more, even if it means fighting the war I was trained for among people of my own kind, I am not sure I agree with High Command’s current priorities. There is nothing that I can do out there that a hundred other eager young _arisths_ cannot be recruited and trained to do. But there is plenty that I can do here. >

“You could die here,” I pointed out.

<I could die out there, too.>

“If you die here, it would be without ever seeing your family again.”

He turned to look at me with his main eyes. <If I die out there, it will be without ever seeing my _shomaktil_ again. >

I mentally parsed the unfamiliar word. In my mind it translated pretty close to ‘brothers’, and before I’d started studying Ax’s language I probably wouldn’t have noticed the other subtle shades in it. Something like ‘blade brothers’ or ‘grove brothers’ – a word halfway between ‘comrades-in-arms’ and ‘family’.

I looked away and blinked back tears.

“Do you think she was right?” I asked.

<Hmm?>

“Estrid. Should we have let her do it? My reasoning on this is biased. Not just because it’s my species, including my own family, that would have been at risk, but also because biological warfare just has such an awful history among humans. But if it had been safe, and even if it hadn’t been and had taken out a tenth of us… it’s evil. It’s unquestionably evil. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately that there aren’t any good decisions in war. You’re not as biased as I am on this. Would it have been worth the risk?”

<Oh, no. Her calculations were completely wrong. That is the problem with everything Estrid does; she keeps going for the big, fancy strategy and being tripped up by little things.>

“How so?”

<If you humans are really as big a threat as she insisted, if you are too big a threat to be allowed to fight for your own fate against the yeerks, then you are threatening enough to defeat the yeerks with lower casualties than her virus. It stands to reason.> He stared back up at the sky. <Even if you must do so without andalite help.>

I ran one hand down his arm. “We have the help of one andalite.”

Ax’s eyes squinted in a warm andalite smile. <Yes,> he said. <You do.>


End file.
